Editorial Wild Oats
M >> Mark Twain >> Editorial Wild OatsEditorial Wild Oats
BY
Mark Twain
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS--MCMV
Copyright, 1875, 1899, 1903, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1879, 1899, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published September, 1905.
[Illustration: See p. 57
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED"]
Contents
PAGE
MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE 3
JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 11
NICODEMUS DODGE--PRINTER 30
MR. BLOKE'S ITEM 41
HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL
PAPER 52
THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED" 70
Illustrations
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED" _Frontispiece_
"HE HAD CONCLUDED HE
WOULDN'T" _Facing p._ 4
"GILLESPIE HAD CALLED" " 24
"WHEEZING THE MUSIC OF 'CAMPTOWN
RACES'" " 38
"I HAVE READ THIS ABSURD ITEM
OVER" " 50
"A LONG CADAVEROUS CREATURE" " 58
"THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE
POCKETS" " 82
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|Transcriber's Note: The dialect in this book is transcribed exactly as|
|in the original. |
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Editorial Wild Oats
My First Literary Venture
I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually
smart child, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first
newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a
fine sensation in the community. It did, indeed, and I was very
proud of it, too. I was a printer's "devil," and a progressive and
aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the _Weekly Hannibal
Journal_, two dollars a year, in advance--five hundred subscribers,
and they paid in cord-wood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips),
and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and
asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper
judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor on
the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend
found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated
that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear
Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back
to shore. He had concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it
for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this
was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of
the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villanous cuts
engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife--one of
them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt,
with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick.
I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that
there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being
satisfied with this effort, I looked around for other worlds to
conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter
to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of
gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm."
[Illustration: "HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T"]
I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the
"Burial of Sir John Moore"--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.
Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because
they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought
it was my duty to make the paper lively.
Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day,
the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering
coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the
State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy
"poetry" for the _Journal_, about his newest conquest. His rhymes
for my week were headed, "TO MARY IN H--L," meaning to Mary in
Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly
riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt
of humor, and I compressed it into a snappy footnote at the
bottom--thus:
"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J.
Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character
to sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune
with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium than
the columns of this journal!"
The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so
much attention as those playful trifles of mine.
For once the _Hannibal Journal_ was in demand--a novelty it had
not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped
in with a double-barrelled shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he
found that it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the
damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his
situation that night and left town for good. The tailor came with
his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me, too, and
departed for the South that night. The two lampooned citizens came
with threats of libel, and went away incensed at my insignificance.
The country editor pranced in with a warwhoop next day, suffering
for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving me cordially and
inviting me down to the drug-store to wash away all animosity in a
friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge." It was his little
joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back--unreasonably so, I
thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and
considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have
been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so
wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his
head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and
saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of
thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for
it--cord-wood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run
the family for two years!
Journalism in Tennessee
The editor of the Memphis _Avalanche_ swoops thus mildly down upon
a correspondent who posted him as a Radical: "While he was writing
the first word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's, and
punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was
saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood."--_Exchange_.
I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve
my health, and so I went down to Tennessee and got a berth on the
_Morning-Glory and Johnson County Warwhoop_ as associate editor.
When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in
a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table. There was
another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and
both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of
manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with
cigar-stubs and "old soldiers," and a stove with a door hanging by
its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth
frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and
neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a
standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief
with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was
smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his
hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling
fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly
knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through
them and write up the "Spirit of the Tennessee Press," condensing
into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.
I wrote as follows:
"SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
"The editors of the _Semi-Weekly Earthquake_ evidently labor
under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad. It
is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one
side. On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important
points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to
slight it. The gentlemen of the _Earthquake_ will, of course,
take pleasure in making the correction.
"John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville
_Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of Freedom_, arrived in the city
yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.
"We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs _Morning
Howl_ has fallen into the error of supposing that the election of
Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have
discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no
doubt. He was doubtless misled by incomplete election returns.
"It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is
endeavoring to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its
wellnigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The
_Daily Hurrah_ urges the measure with ability, and seems
confident of ultimate success."
I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance,
alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded.
He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous.
It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up
and said:
"Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of
those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to
stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!"
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or
plough through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly.
While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through
the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.
"Ah," said he, "that is that scoundrel Smith, of the _Moral
Volcano_--he was due yesterday." And he snatched a navy revolver
from his belt and fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot
spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a second chance, and he
crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and
interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand-grenade came down
the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a
thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that
a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
"That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
"Well, no matter--don't want it this kind of weather. I know the
man that did it. I'll get him. Now, _here_ is the way this stuff
ought to be written."
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and
interlineations till its mother wouldn't have known it if it had
had one. It now read as follows:
"SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
"The inveterate liars of the _Semi-Weekly Earthquake_ are
evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous
people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to
that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the
Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off
at one side originated in their own fulsome brains--or rather in
the settlings which _they_ regard as brains. They had better
swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile
carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
"That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville _Thunderbolt and
Battle-Cry of Freedom_, is down here again sponging at the Van
Buren.
"We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs
_Morning Howl_ is giving out, with his usual propensity for
lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of
journalism is to disseminate truth: to eradicate error; to
educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and
manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more
charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and
yet this black-hearted scoundrel degrades his great office
persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny,
vituperation, and vulgarity.
"Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement--it wants a jail and a
poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town
composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith-shop, and that
mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the _Daily Hurrah_! The crawling
insect, Buckner, who edits the _Hurrah_, is braying about this
business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is
talking sense."
"Now _that_ is the way to write--peppery and to the point.
Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods."
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering
crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved
out of range--I began to feel in the way.
The chief said: "That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting
him for two days. He will be up now right away."
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment
afterwards with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said: "Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who
edits this mangy sheet?"
"You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs
is gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar,
Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh?"
"Right, sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are
at leisure we will begin."
"I have an article on the 'Encouraging Progress of Moral and
Intellectual Development in America' to finish, but there is no
hurry. Begin."
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The
chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its
career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder
was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this
time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both
gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I
then said I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a
private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it
further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured
me that I was not in the way.
They then talked about the elections and the crops while they
reloaded, and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they
opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect--but
it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share.
The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine
humor, that he would have to say good-morning now, as he had
business up-town. He then inquired the way to the undertaker's and
left.
The chief turned to me and said: "I am expecting company to dinner,
and shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will
read proof and attend to the customers."
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I
was too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my
ears to think of anything to say.
He continued: "Jones will be here at three--cowhide him. Gillespie
will call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window. Ferguson
will be along about four--kill him. That is all for to-day, I
believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering
article on the police--give the chief inspector rats. The cowhides
are under the table; weapons in the drawer--ammunition there in the
corner--lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of
accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, down-stairs. He advertises--we
take it out in trade."
[Illustration: "GILLESPIE HAD CALLED"]
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I
had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all
cheerfulness were gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown
_me_ out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got
ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands. In an
encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my
scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere
wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner,
and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians,
and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons
about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the
chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic
friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human
pen, or steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed,
dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brief
tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance
glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there
was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the
sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us.
He said: "You'll like this place when you get used to it."
I said: "I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I
might write to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some
practice and learned the language I am confident I could. But, to
speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of expression has its
inconveniences, and a man is liable to interruption. You see that
yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no
doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as it
calls forth. I can't write with comfort when I am interrupted so
much as I have been to-day. I like this berth well enough, but I
don't like to be left here to wait on the customers. The
experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a
fashion, but they are not judiciously distributed. A gentleman
shoots at you through the window and cripples _me_; a bomb-shell
comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification and sends the
stove-door down _my_ throat; a friend drops in to swap compliments
with you, and freckles _me_ with bullet-holes till my skin won't
hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his
cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all
my clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy
freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all
the blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and
proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks. Take
it altogether, I never had such a spirited time in all my life as I
have had to-day. No; I like you, and I like your calm, unruffled
way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am not
used to it. The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern
hospitality is too lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I
have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences your masterly
hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennessean journalism, will
wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors will
come--and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for
breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present
at these festivities. I came South for my health; I will go back on
the same errand, and suddenly. Tennessean journalism is too
stirring for me."
After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at
the hospital.
Nicodemus Dodge--Printer
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri, a
loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad, countrified cub
of about sixteen lounged in one day, and without removing his hands
from the depths of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded
ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged about
his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage-leaf, stared
indifferently around, then leaned his hip against the editors'
table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a
crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said, with composure:
"Whar's the boss?"
"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of
architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.
"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"
"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"
"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git a show
somers if I kin, 'tain't no diffunce what--I'm strong and hearty,
and I don't turn my back on no kind of work, hard nur soft."
"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"
"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I _do_ learn, so's I git a
chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon learn print'n' 's
anything."
"Can you read?"
"Yes--middlin'."
"Write?"
"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."
"Cipher?"
"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon, but up as fur as
twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch. 'Tother side of that is what
gits me."
"Where is your home?"
"I'm f'm old Shelby."
"What's your father's religious denomination?"
"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."
"No, no--I don't mean his trade. What's his _religious_
denomination?"
"_Oh_--I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."
"No, no; you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is, does he
belong to any _church_?"
"_Now_ you're talkin'! Gouldn't make out what you was
a-tryin' to git through yo' head no way. B'long to a _church_! Why,
boss, he's be'n the pizenest kind of a Free-will Babtis' for forty
year. They ain't no pizener ones 'n' what _he_ is. Mighty good man,
pap is. Everybody says that. If they said any diffrunt they
wouldn't say it whar _I_ wuz--not _much_ they wouldn't."
"What is your own religion?"
"Well, boss, you've kind o' got me thar--and yit you hain't got me
so mighty much, nuther. I think 't if a feller he'ps another feller
when he's in trouble, and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things,
nur noth'n' he ain' no business to do, and don't spell the
Saviour's name with a little g, he ain't runnin' no resks--he's
about as saift as if he b'longed to a church."
"But suppose he did spell it with a little g--what then?"
"Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn't stand no
chance,--he _oughtn't_ to have no chance, anyway, I'm most rotten
certain 'bout that."
"What is your name?"
"Nicodemus Dodge."
"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus. We'll give you a trial,
anyway."
"All right."
"When would you like to begin?"
"Now."
So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript
he was one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.
Beyond that end of our establishment which was farthest from the
street was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the
bloomy and villanous "jimpson" weed and its common friend the
stately sunflower. In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed
and aged little "frame" house with but one room, one window, and no
ceiling--it had been a smoke-house a generation before. Nicodemus
was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.
The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus right
away--a butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see that he was
inconceivably green and confiding. George Jones had the glory of
perpetrating the first joke on him; he gave him a cigar with a
fire-cracker in it and winked to the crowd to come; the thing
exploded presently and swept away the bulk of Nicodemus's eyebrows
and eyelashes. He simply said:
"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome"--and seemed to
suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and
poured a bucket of ice-water over him.
One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy "tied" his
clothes. Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's by way of retaliation.
A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later--he
walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night,
with a staring hand-bill pinned between his shoulders. The joker
spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a
deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till towards
breakfast-time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if
any noise was made some rough treatment would be the consequence.
The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed
with six inches of soft mud.
But I wander from the point. It was the subject of skeletons that
brought this boy back to my recollection. Before a very long time
had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable
consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of
their attempts on the simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters
grew scarce and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.
There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus
to death, and explained how he was going to do it. He had a noble
new skeleton--the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity,
Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard--a grisly piece of property which
he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,
under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tanyard a
fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for
whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in
the skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in
Nicodemus's bed!