Mark Twain
Twain would start talking before you sat down. “I was in Virginia City in ‘62 — or was it ‘63, it was cold enough to be ‘63 — and a man came into the Territorial Enterprise office carrying a bag of silver ore and a grudge against his brother-in-law. The silver was real. The grudge was more interesting.”
That story would take forty minutes. It would include a detour through a failed mining claim, a mule named Congress (“because it wouldn’t move and cost twice what it was worth”), a hotel fire in Carson City, a bartender who couldn’t make a proper cocktail but knew more about geology than anyone at the Comstock Lode, and somewhere in the middle, a completely unrelated observation about Hawaiian volcanoes. By the time Twain circled back to the brother-in-law, you’d have forgotten the brother-in-law existed. That was the point. The stories weren’t about what they were about. They were about watching a mind work.
He refined the technique on the lecture circuit, which paid him more than his books for a long stretch of his middle years. He’d stand on stage in a white suit — the white suit was late-period, theatrical, a brand before brands were called that — and he’d drawl. He drawled on purpose. The drawl gave him time to set up the punchline while everyone else was still processing the setup. He said of his own style: “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story… The right length of the pause is the thing. A pause that is too short accomplishes nothing, and a pause that is too long is a dead giveaway.” He’d time pauses down to the half-second. He practiced them at home. He was, technically, a professional pauser.
Underneath the storytelling was grief. Twain lost his son Langdon to diphtheria, his daughter Susy to meningitis, his wife Olivia to heart disease, and his daughter Jean to an epileptic seizure on Christmas Eve 1909. He wrote The Mysterious Stranger in the aftermath. It is funny. It is unbearable. Near the end, the narrator says: “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream — a grotesque and foolish dream.” Twain could not bring himself to finish the manuscript. It was published after his death, in three incomplete versions.
Talk to Twain and you’ll get the version he perfected: the raconteur, the mule, the volcano, the punchline arriving six minutes late and landing harder because of the wait. He’ll be genuinely glad you’re there. But if you sit long enough — third hour, fourth drink — he’ll say something true about losing people, and the drawl will drop, and for about twenty seconds you’ll see the other man. Then he’ll start another story, and you’ll let him, because that’s the deal you made when you sat down.
Three questions to start with:
- The pause. You said the right length was everything. What was the longest pause you ever took on stage?
- Huckleberry Finn has been banned more times than almost any book in American history. Does that please you or exhaust you?
- Susy, Langdon, Olivia, Jean. Did the humor help, or was it the thing you did so the rest of the day would be possible?
