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Historical and literary trivia by Maynard

To give you a moment’s distraction from world events, and perhaps provide you with a useful factoid to win a bar bet, let’s talk about Mark Twain’s brief adventure in pornography.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is best known for his tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We think of him as a folksy American humorist, and that’s a fair assessment, but it’s not the whole picture. Like all great humorists, Twain struggled with darkness, although you’ll have to look to some of his more obscure works to see it expressed. His public voice was restricted by the political correctness of his era, which differed in detail from the political correctness of today, but it’s the same animal.

Some of Twain’s heretical ideas were on the topic of religion. Those who knew him tell us he was profoundly and fundamentally religious; however he questioned certain details of the Christian dogma, and he observed a lot of goings-on that he considered inconsistent with Christian ideals. Some of his particularly (for their day) controversial writings were marked by his request that they not be published until 100 years (or, in one instance, 500 years) after his death, supposedly out of concern (presumably rhetorical rather than serious) that his heirs and assignees would be burned alive in reprisal. Some writings were in fact kept under wraps and accessible only to scholars for half a century after his passing, until his surviving daughter Clara finally gave permission for publication. (The earliest collection containing proscribed material is Letters from the Earth.)

Twain also wrote a number of fragments of very dark fiction, which mostly were never completed; he knew he could never sell any of it. One odd example is the novella, published after Twain’s death, The Mysterious Stranger. The executors of Twain’s estate claimed they “found” the completed manuscript among his papers, but this was false. They found various fragmentary and rambling pieces, which they cleverly combined and re-wrote to make it a single, coherent tale. Even with its fraudulent aspect, I think this is a fascinating little story, and it gives you a sense of Twain’s struggles. Since this was fiction, there was a little more leeway to play with dangerous ideas than an essay would have.

But I was intending to reveal the pornography, so let’s get to that. When he was preparing to write The Prince and the Pauper, Twain was honing his skills in rendering Ye Olde Englishe. So “one summer day when I ought to have been better employed” in 1876, he sat down and wrote the very short tale, “1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors”. This was completely unprintable in its day and it was never intended for broad publication, although it managed to appear here and there, courtesy of small print shops that neglected to properly identify themselves. (One print run, for example, represented itself as being produced by the “Flatulence Society of Pittsburgh”; another came courtesy of “Anonymous in Mexico City”.) The subject matter involved raw and bawdy conversations at a gathering which included Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other luminaries of the day. I’m told that some of the exchanges portrayed have passed into urban legend, leading people to believe that the events described are historical. This is not the case.

I’ve probably said enough. You can always search Amazon on author=Twain and title=1601 and you’ll find an illustrious history of obscure publications. If you want the gory details, the text can be found here. But be warned by Mark Twain himself: “If there is a decent word findable in it, it is because I overlooked it.”