An English major in Salt Lake City reads what the great American humorist wrote about her city and has to decide how she feels
Mark Twain Came Through My Hometown in 1861 and Was Rude About It
I am in the library on the third floor, at the carrel by the window that looks straight up at the mountains, with a cold hot chocolate and a book that has been making me laugh and wince in turns for three hours. There was fresh snow on the peaks this morning, the first of the fall. The valley is all yellow cottonwoods. And I am reading a dead man’s jokes about the street I parked on.
My American literature class is doing humor this month. The assigned text is Roughing It, which Mark Twain published in 1872. I had read the boy-on-a-raft books. I did not know he had been here.
The Trip
In the summer of 1861, before he was Mark Twain, when he was a twenty-five-year-old named Sam Clemens who had just quit piloting riverboats, his older brother was appointed secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory. Sam went along for the ride. They crossed the plains and the Rockies by stagecoach, nineteen days of it, sleeping on mail sacks.
On the way they stopped for two days in Great Salt Lake City, which was then fourteen years old. Ten years later he wrote the journey up, much improved, and several chapters are about this valley and the people who had settled it.
He is very funny. I want to say that first. And he is not kind.
What He Said
Some of it is admiring, almost in spite of himself. He was struck by how orderly the place was. Wide, straight streets. A clear stream running in a ditch down each side of every one, for irrigation. Neat houses, orchards, gardens, no loafers and no drunks in sight. He says it was a town of people who were visibly busy. He liked the mountains, and who would not.
Then he gets going. He has a long comic routine about the leader of the church and his very large household, which goes on for pages and involves a great many beds. He describes meeting the man himself and being put out that the great leader paid attention only to his brother and patted Sam on the head. He reports buying a famous local whiskey. And he reviews the faith’s sacred book in a few paragraphs that include a phrase so cutting that people here still quote it, a little proudly, a hundred and fifty years on. He said it was so slow it would put you to sleep, in rather more memorable words.
I laughed out loud at the carrel. Then I felt like I had laughed at my grandmother.
How I Feel About It
I have been turning this over all afternoon, and I think it is more than one feeling.
The first is that he is doing what a twenty-five-year-old tourist does. He was here forty-eight hours. He admits most of what he reports is what other travelers told him. He takes the thing everybody back East already found scandalous and he makes the easy joke about it. If I am honest, that is the weakest stuff in the book. It is funny the way a stranger’s impression of your family is funny: quick, a bit accurate, and missing everything that matters.
The second is that he could be fair when he looked with his own eyes. The ditches, the gardens, the order. He noticed that. He also wrote, elsewhere in the same book, with real anger about how settlers and governments treated other people in the West, and some of what he wrote about native people in it is ugly and I will not defend it. He was a man of his time who got better. That is in the footnotes, and I think you have to read him whole.
The third feeling is the one I did not expect. It is professional. I read the whiskey passage and I thought, that is a well-built paragraph. Dang it.
The Conversation With My Professor
I went to office hours. My professor is a tiny woman from Georgia who has taught here for thirty years and misses nothing. I said I was having trouble with the Salt Lake chapters. She said, good, you are supposed to.
She asked me what the difference was between Twain on this valley and Twain, later in life, on kings, on imperial wars, on people who lynched. I said those targets were powerful, or cruel. She said, and here? I said here he is mostly making fun of people who were poor, had been run out of three states, and had walked across a continent pulling carts. She said, so he is punching which way? I said, sideways at best. She said, and when is he funniest? I had to think. I said: when he is the fool. The best joke in those chapters is him getting his head patted.
She said, write that down. That is your paper.
The London Connection
I told her about my other life. I write a short piece a week for The London Prat, a comic newspaper in England, and I have just started, nervously, to write about home. She had heard of it. She said the British have been at this since before there was a United States, and that Twain himself loved the English humorists and went over there and was treated like a king.
That night I reread the paper’s essay, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, with Roughing It open beside it. It could be a grading rubric for those chapters. Is the target someone with power? Is the writer telling the truth underneath? Is the writer willing to be the fool? Where Twain passes those tests, he is immortal. Where he fails them, he is just a clever boy on a stagecoach.
The paper also keeps a page on the British Onion tradition that traces the family tree. Twain belongs on the American branch of it. He is why papers like our sister Bohiney exist. He took the tall tale and the deadpan newspaper hoax, which he wrote plenty of as a young reporter in Nevada, and made them literature. Several of his hoaxes were reprinted as fact by other papers. He thought that was the reader’s problem. My editor would have sent him the guide to telling satire from real news and docked his pay.
What I Am Taking From Him
Three things, for my own work.
One. Look with your own eyes. He was best on the ditches because he saw the ditches. He was worst on what he had only heard. I was born here. I have the advantage he did not, and I should use it instead of borrowing an outsider’s jokes about my own people.
Two. Be the fool. The head-patting is the part I will remember in thirty years.
Three. Forty-eight hours is not enough to mock a place, and nineteen years is not too many to love it and mock it anyway.
A Small Revenge
I have written this week’s piece for London. It is a news item reporting that a young riverboat pilot passing through a western city by stagecoach has filed a strongly worded review after two days, and that the city, having read it, has ranked him fourth among that week’s visitors, behind a mule. It is very short. Every fact about the city in it is true.
It will run on the British satirical news page. My professor has asked for a copy. She says she will give me extra credit if it makes her laugh, and take it away again if I split an infinitive.
The sun has gone off the peaks and they have turned that pink they go for about four minutes. Twain mentions that too. He got that right.
The diary is on Satirical.top. The piece about the mule will be here.