Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

PENGUIN CLASSICS

PUDD’NHEAD WILSON AND THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. When Sam was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi river, where he spent an idyllic boyhood. His father died when he was twelve, and he was apprenticed to a printer, which began his career of reporting and writing entertaining, humorous sketches. But in 1857 he yielded to his boyhood ambition and trained with the great Horace Bixby as a river-boat pilot (from which experience he took the name Mark Twain). The Civil War, however, put an end to the river traffic – and an end to Twain’s career as well. After a brief, hilarious war experience (chronicled in ‘The History of a Campaign that Failed’) he turned his hand to silver prospecting, went back to journalism, and finally published his first short story in 1865.

Mark Twain’s career was a central, representative one in American letters, making the already established role of humorist into a central post of social observation. His worldwide reputation was based on a gift for mixing the boyish mischief and innocence of a naïve, vernacular vision with a dark, bitter view of man as hypocrite, victim and self-deceiver. His finest works are generally considered to be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Life on the Mississippi (1883), not a novel but a superbly evocative memoir, a brilliant account of pilotage and a criticism of the South; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889); The American Claimant (1892); Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the world’s great books. Mark Twain died in 1910.

MALCOLM BRADBURY was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He was the author of seven novels, including The History Man (1975), winner of the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize, and Rates of Exchange (1983), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His other novels include Doctor Criminale (1992) and To the Hermitage (2000). He wrote short-fiction, satires and parodies. Among his many critical works are The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994; revised edition, 2000) and Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (Penguin, 1996). He also edited The Penguin Book of Modern Short Stories (Penguin, 1988), Modernism (with Professor James McFarlane; Penguin, 1991), and The Atlas of Literature (1997). For television he wrote two television novels about the European Community, The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East, and many episodes of A Touch of Frost, Dalziel and Pascoe, Kavanagh Q.C. and Inspector Morse. He also wrote the screenplays of Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, now a feature film. In 1991 he was awarded the CBE and was knighted for services to Literature in 1999.

Malcolm Bradbury died on 27 November 2000. Among the many tributes paid to him, the Guardian described him as ‘one of the most prolific and influential novelists, critics and academics of his generation … His death marks the close of half a century of academic and literary history, of which he was par excellence the chronicler’. David Lodge said of him in The Times: ‘He was remarkable for the breadth of his writing. He was not only an important novelist, but a man of letters of a kind that is now rare. He covered the whole range of literary endeavour’.

RICHARD MAXWELL took a doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago. The author of The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992), and editor of The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), he has also written extensively on the historical novels of John Cowper Powys. He is now working on a study of historical fiction between the seventeenth century and the present. He teaches in the Comparative Literature and English departments at Yale University.

A Whisper to The Reader

A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by a trained barrister – if that is what they are called. These chapters are right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in south-west Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni Vermicelli’s horse-feed shed which is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto’s campanile and yet always got tired looking as soon as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or three legal chapters are right and straight, now. He told me so himself.

Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the hills – the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found on this planet, and with it the most dream-like and enchanting sunsets to be found in any planet or even in any solar system – and given, too, in the swell room of the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators and other grandees of this line looking approvingly down upon me as they used to look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt them into my family, which I do with pleasure, for my remotest ancestors are but spring chickens compared with these robed and stately antiques, and it will be a great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred years will.

MARK TWAIN

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No – that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once started to write – a funny and fantastic sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much the same thing happened with ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’. I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it – a most embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader’s reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one. It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one – a kind of literary Cesarean operation.

Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist works. Won’t he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him how the jack-leg does it?

Originally the story was called ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’. I meant to make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian ‘freak’ – or ‘freaks’ – which was – or which were – on exhibition in our cities – a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs – and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero – or heroes – a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for the minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and their doings, of course. But the tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more room with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a stranger named Pudd’nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background. Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own – a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.

When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I had originally started out with – Aunt Patsy Cooper, Aunt Betsy Hale, the two boys, and Rowena the light-weight heroine – they were no-where to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or other. I hunted about and found them – found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless. It was very awkward. It was awkward all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there was a love-match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a quite dramatic love-quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had happened, and wouldn’t listen to it, and had driven him from her in the usual ‘forever’ way; and now here she sat crying and broken-hearted; for she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but the other half of the freak, that had drunk the liquor that made him drunk; that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in his life, and, although tight as a brick three days in the week, was wholly innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly doing all he could to reform his brother, the other half, who never got any satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because liquor never affected him. Yes, here she was, stranded with that deep injustice of hers torturing her poor torn heart.

I didn’t know what to do with her. I was as sorry for her as anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was side-tracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere. I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one – I must simply give her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So, at the top of Chapter XVII, I put a ‘Calendar’ remark concerning July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:

‘Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.’

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said ‘they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned’. Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said ‘they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.’ I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

Still the story was unsatisfactory. Here was a set of new characters who were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and fell down the well. There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.

The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of – two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as characters. Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail. Also I took those twins apart and made two separate men of them. They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them christened as they were and made no explanation.

Contents

Mark Twain