1601

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1601

by Mark Twain


MARK TWAIN'S
[Date, 1601]

Conversation
As it was by the Social Fireside
in the Time of the Tudors


INTRODUCTION

"Born irreverent," scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, "--like all
other people I have ever known or heard of--I am hoping to remain so
while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of."
--[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L. Clemens, in the collection of the
F. J. Meine]

Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his
richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language,
genteel literature, and conventional idiocies. Later, when a magazine
editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!" Mark impishly and
anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais,
scathingly abused it and the sender. In this episode, as in many others,
Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American literature, revealed his huge
delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy. Too, there was
always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted
him, as he himself boasted, to see how much holy indignation he could
stir up in the world.


WHO WROTE 1601?

The correct and complete title of 1601, as first issued, was: [Date,
1601.] 'Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of
the Tudors.' For many years after its anonymous first issue in 1880,
its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed. In Boston,
William T. Ball, one of the leading theatrical critics during the late
90's, asserted that it was originally written by an English actor (name
not divulged) who gave it to him. Ball's original, it was said, looked
like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed, and may indeed have
been a proof pulled in some newspaper office. In St. Louis, William
Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour
de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first
learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.

"Many people," said Reedy, "thought the thing was done by Field and
attributed, as a joke, to Mark Twain. Field had a perfect genius for
that sort of thing, as many extant specimens attest, and for that sort of
practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow
--not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's." Reedy's opinion
hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists;
one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French Crisis.

But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906,
in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr, librarian of Case Library,
Cleveland. Said Clemens, in the course of his letter, dated July 30,
1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:

"The title of the piece is 1601. The piece is a supposititious
conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year,
between the Queen, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess
of Bilgewater, and one or two others, and is not, as John Hay mistakenly
supposes, a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to
the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word findable
in it, it is because I overlooked it. I hasten to assure you that it is
not printed in my published writings."


TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL

The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been
officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain,
A Bibliography' (1912), and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook
(1935).

1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had
retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York. Here Mrs. Clemens
enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the
countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched high
on the hill, looked out upon the valley below. It was in the famous
summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom
Sawyer. Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on
'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', published in 1885. It is
interesting to note the use of the title, the "Duke of Bilgewater," in
Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her
appearance in 1601. Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces, Tom
Sawyer and Huck Finn, the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude.

During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items, most of them
rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books,
Pepys' Diary. Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys'
style and spirit, and "he determined," says Albert Bigelow Paine in his
'Mark Twain, A Biography', "to try his hand on an imaginary record of
conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of
the period. The result was 'Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen
Elizabeth', or as he later called it, '1601'. The 'conversation'
recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy, vocabulary, and
physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention."

"It was written as a letter," continues Paine, "to that robust divine,
Rev. Joseph Twichell, who, unlike Howells, had no scruples about Mark's
'Elizabethan breadth of parlance.'"

The Rev. Joseph Twichell, Mark's most intimate friend for over forty
years, was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford,
which Mark facetiously called the "Church of the Holy Speculators,"
because of its wealthy parishioners. Here Mark had first met "Joe" at a
social, and their meeting ripened into a glorious, life long friendship.
Twichell was a man of about Mark's own age, a profound scholar, a devout
Christian, "yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound
understanding of the frailties of mankind." The Rev. Mr. Twichell
performed the marriage ceremony for Mark Twain and solemnized the births
of his children; "Joe," his friend, counseled him on literary as well as
personal matters for the remainder of Mark's life. It is important to
catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was
written, for without it one can not fully understand the spirit in which
1601 was written, or the keen enjoyment which Mark and "Joe" derived from
it.


"SAVE ME ONE."

The story of the first issue of 1601 is one of finesse, state diplomacy,
and surreptitious printing.

The Rev. "Joe" Twichell, for whose delectation the piece had been
written, apparently had pocketed the document for four long years. Then,
in 1880, it came into the hands of John Hay, later Secretary of State,
presumably sent to him by Mark Twain. Hay pronounced the sketch a
masterpiece, and wrote immediately to his old Cleveland friend, Alexander
Gunn, prince of connoisseurs in art and literature. The following
correspondence reveals the fine diplomacy which made the name of John Hay
known throughout the world.


DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Washington

June 21, 1880.
Dear Gunn:

Are you in Cleveland for all this week? If you will say yes by return
mail, I have a masterpiece to submit to your consideration which is only
in my hands for a few days.

Yours, very much worritted by the depravity of Christendom,

Hay


The second letter discloses Hay's own high opinion of the effort and his
deep concern for its safety.



June 24, 1880
My dear Gunn:

Here it is. It was written by Mark Twain in a serious effort to bring
back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste Elizabethan
standard. But the taste of the present day is too corrupt for anything
so classic. He has not yet been able even to find a publisher. The
Globe has not yet recovered from Downey's inroad, and they won't touch
it.

I send it to you as one of the few lingering relics of that race of
appreciative critics, who know a good thing when they see it.

Read it with reverence and gratitude and send it back to me; for Mark is
impatient to see once more his wandering offspring.

Yours,
Hay.


In his third letter one can almost hear Hay's chuckle in the certainty
that his diplomatic, if somewhat wicked, suggestion would bear fruit.


Washington, D. C.
July 7, 1880
My dear Gunn:

I have your letter, and the proposition which you make to pull a few
proofs of the masterpiece is highly attractive, and of course highly
immoral. I cannot properly consent to it, and I am afraid the great many
would think I was taking an unfair advantage of his confidence. Please
send back the document as soon as you can, and if, in spite of my
prohibition, you take these proofs, save me one.

Very truly yours,
John Hay.



Thus was this Elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type.
According to Merle Johnson, Mark Twain's bibliographer, it was issued in
pamphlet form, without wrappers or covers; there were 8 pages of text and
the pamphlet measured 7 by 8 1/2 inches. Only four copies are believed to
have been printed, one for Hay, one for Gunn, and two for Twain.

"In the matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's delicious
notes, "what an unsurpassable touch John Hay had!"


HUMOR AT WEST POINT

The first printing of 1601 in actual book form was "Donne at ye Academie
Press," in 1882, West Point, New York, under the supervision of Lieut. C.
E. S. Wood, then adjutant of the U. S. Military Academy.

In 1882 Mark Twain and Joe Twichell visited their friend Lieut. Wood at
West Point, where they learned that Wood, as Adjutant, had under his
control a small printing establishment. On Mark's return to Hartford,
Wood received a letter asking if he would do Mark a great favor by
printing something he had written, which he did not care to entrust to
the ordinary printer. Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige.
On April 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:

"I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest. I am afraid there
are errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuck on
often at end of words where they are not strickly necessary, etc.....
I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, and
it is not important anyway. I wish you would do me the kindness to make
any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.

"Sincerely yours,
"S. L. Clemens."


Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote for the
limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he
first saw the original manuscript. "When I read it," writes Wood,
"I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a
printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the
pretended 'conversation.'

"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a
species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually
deceive a scholar. Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his
only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was
becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I
brought to the doing.

"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade
linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to
mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the
'copy' on a hand press. I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan
abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the
(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).

"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English
words introduced. The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but
the text is exactly as written by Mark. I wrote asking his view of
making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to
do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."

Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious
masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified
institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.

"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a
century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was
rather inordinately vain of it. At that time it had been privately
printed in several countries, among them Japan. A sumptuous edition on
large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point
--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such
people. In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I
was there six years ago, and none to be had."


FROM THE DEPTHS

Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
well-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off
human beings and left them cringing before the public view. With the
deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.

The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep
in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed
1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,

"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining
was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.
He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots,
roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as
Lincoln did.

"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
gamblers and the men of '49. The simple roughness of a frontier people
was in his blood and brain.

"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.
Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language is
forcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make for
weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. Then
I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every
word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but
only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene in
itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"

Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a
semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
sense of character. It was made especially effective by the artistic
arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a
phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the
spacious times of great Elizabeth."

Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried
over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere
delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals.
That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent
from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers
to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:

"Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have made
a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of that
kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England
had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and
conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred years ago; in
fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly
speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and the real gentleman
discoverable in English history,--or in European history, for that
matter--may be said to have made their appearance. Suppose Sir Walter
[Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths of his
characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We
should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena
which would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the unconsciously
indelicate all things are delicate."

Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historical
periods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historical
reading in preference to fiction, and through his other historical
writings. Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Paine
reports that "Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. Then,
as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose
himself in English or French history until his sleep conquered." Paine
tells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.

The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefully Clemens
examined his historical background, and his interest in these materials.
Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'History of
England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'Blue
Laws, True and False'. Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard
DeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain. Its parodies of Tudor
speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Mark
hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys." The writing of
1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.

"Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to
do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words"
Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.

Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his published
works, it was representative of Mark Twain the man. He was no emaciated
literary tea-tosser. Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Mark was
a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the several
phases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, and
frontier journalist.

On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M. Daggett
that "when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no expletives
too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession to emphasize
the utter want of character of the man assailed.... There were
typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would have
frightened a Bengal tiger. The news editor could damn a mutilated
dispatch in twenty-four languages."

In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark Twain
and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The Doleful
Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected erotica.
One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find his room-mate
standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big
revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement," relates Paine in
his Biography.

"'Come here, Steve,' he said. 'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead
on him.'

"'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily
kill him at any range with your profanity.'

"Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing
blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican hairless
dog."

Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay and
youthful days in San Francisco. With Clemens it may truly be said that
profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.

"It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,
life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'd swear
something terrible if I didn't. If he found a shirt in his drawer
without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and
throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the bathroom
window they'd go. I used to look out every morning to see the
snowflakes--anything white. Out they'd fly.... Oh! he'd swear at
anything when he was on a rampage. He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I'd go and
knock; I'd say, 'Mrs. Clemens wants to know what's the matter.' And
then he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me
Katy?' 'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.' Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he
was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.
Clemens hated swearing." But his swearing never seemed really bad to
Katy Leary, "It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said.
"Sort of amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore
like an angel."

In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
billiards. "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace. "He loved the game,
and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then
the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more
youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,
slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."

Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his
appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found
its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been called
"Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."

In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that
Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure
chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasures was a
volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the
Great. "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher
translated some of the verses, "I would blush to remember any of these
stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna."
When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his
pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing
German these days she can't even attempt to get at this."

In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, the
Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
in it he was Shakespearean."

"With a nigger squat on her safety-valve"
John Hay, Pike County Ballads.

"Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of his
Elizabethan breadth of parlance?' Mr. Howells confesses that he
sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,
to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not
bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out in
an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.' Mark Twain's verbal
Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not
having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left
thereto ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of
forbidden words. Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside
conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete verbal
indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly
resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment
and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for
him the roitous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve,
and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the
waste of a priceless psychic material!" Thus, Brooks lumps 1601 with
Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply as another indication of
frustration.