We’ve all been there. Asked to say meaningful and appropriate remarks at some important occasion, we blow it. Maybe we went on too long. Maybe we said something we shouldn’t have. Maybe we were expressing some unresolved anger. Or maybe we were deliberately expressing our hostility.
If it’s any solace, Mark Twain has been there as well. And he bombed in a pretty special setting-as the headline speaker after a dinner held in Boston on December 17, 1877. Organized the Atlantic Monthly, then the nation’s leading literary and cultural magazine, the dinner celebrated the 70th birthday of John Greenleaf Whitter, then one of the nation’s most esteemed poets. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was 74, at the head table with Whittier, as were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendall Holmes, and William Dean Howells, who was the magazine’s editor at the time.
“If a painter could have caught for his canvas the picture presented when the hosts and guests were all seated, the scene would…have rivalled the imaginary one of Shakespeare and his friends,” the Boston Daily Advertiser reported the next day, adding “The trio—Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow—gave a reverend, almost holy air to the place, and their gray hairs and expressive, joyful faces formed a beautiful group.”
Whittier, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 2-cent stamp issued in February 1940, is not well known today (except, perhaps as the namesake of a heavily-used bridge on I-95 over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts). Before the Civil War, he was a leading abolitionist known for his poems, essays and activism against slavery. After the war, he became famous for his poems about rural life, and—along with Longfellow, Holmes, William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – was known as one of America’s “Fireside Poets” (i.e. those whose poems could be read and recited as people sat around the hearth). He was best known for “Snowbound,” a long poem that weaves together a series of stories told by a family amid a snowstorm. Published in 1866, it was almost as popular as Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” and was regularly republished well into the 20th century.
So it was a big deal when the 42-year old Twain, a westerner who had become prominent after Howells published some of his early work in The Atlantic Monthly, stood up to speak to the 50-to-100 people in the room. In his autobiography, Twain recalled looking out on the scene and seeing “Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere.”
Twain had decided to have some good-natured fun at the expense of his somewhat staid Boston crowd. He launched into a story about a lonely old miner in southern California who’d been visited by three disreputable tramps named Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Holmes. The miner described Emerson as “a seedly little bit of a chap, red-headed,” while Holmes was “as fat as a balloon” and Longfellow was “built like a prizefighter.” He recounted how the poets quoted apposite selections from their poetry at the miner, while drinking his whiskey and playing cards. “They swelled around the cabin and spouted,” said Twain who also said they fought and made the miner sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”
This attempt at humor failed. Twain later wrote: “the house’s attention continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn’t know. I went on, but with difficulty.” He added: “When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as miserable again as I was then.”
Howells later described the speech as “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe,” adding, “After the first two or three hundred words, those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end.”
Twain’s intemperate remarks also were roundly criticized by the press. The Boston Herald, for example, observed: “though not reaching obscenity or blasphemy,” his speech was “so out of place…as to indicate a stupidity which people have not generally associated with the name of its author.” And the Rocky Mountain News noted, his remarks “were pointless enough to offend every intelligent reader.”
Twain did send letters of apology to Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow. Longfellow responded that he was “a little troubled, that you should be so much troubled about a matter of such slight importance,” adding “the newspapers have made all the mischief.” However, Emerson’s daughter, who handled all his correspondence, wrote (only to Twain’s wife), that the family was disappointed since “we have liked almost everything we have ever seen over Mark Twain’s signature.”
However, in his autobiography, which was published decades later, Twain wrote that he had recently twice reread the speech and “unless I am an idiot, it hasn’t a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be….What could have been the matter with that house? It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn’t shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can’t be successfully funny if you show that you are afraid of it….the fault must have been with me, it is not in the speech at all.”
I take heart from the fact that someone as talented as Twain could screw up. But unlike Twain, I don’t think I’d see my earlier missteps in such a positive light.
Be well, stay safe, be successfully funny by showing you’re not afraid of it, fight for justice, and work for peace.