The forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books features Chris Flannery’s longish essay on Mark Twain and the new biography of him by Ron Chernow. The essay runs under the heading “Pure gold.” Early in the essay Chris recounts:
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In his Autobiography Mark Twain tells the story of a mesmerizer who came to Hannibal in May 1850, charging 25 cents for admission to see his marvels. Within a couple of weeks, the hypnotist was doing a booming business. When Sam Clemens saw all the mesmerized “subjects” performing antics on the platform and making the crowds laugh and shout, he was stung with envy, especially when a young man named Hicks became the glorified hero. Hicks was a journeyman printer in the print shop where Sam worked. Sam was 14. Twain looked back on his young self and recalled that he was at “the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things short of death by fire, if thereby he may be conspicuous and show off before the public.” So, he determined to become one of the mesmerizer’s subjects himself and to outdo all others, especially young Hicks: “Upon suggestion I fled from snakes; passed buckets at a fire; became excited over hot steamboat-races; made love to imaginary girls and kissed them; fished from the platform and landed mud-cats that outweighed me.”
He did much more, too, and soon achieved triumphant victory, and found that it was easy. For Hicks was born honest; I, without that encumbrance…. Hicks had no imagination, I had a double supply. He was born calm, I was born excited. No vision could start a rapture in him and he was constipated as to language, anyway; but if I saw a vision I emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my mind into the bargain.
Under the supposed spell of the mesmerizer, Sam performed such prodigies of his own invention that he succeeded in making his whole town, including his mother, believe that they had witnessed such mesmerization as had never before been seen.
Thirty-five years later, visiting his mother after not seeing her for ten years, the noble impulse came upon Clemens to confess the deception he had perpetrated so many years before. It was fruitless. Nothing he could say or do would convince her. She had seen 35 years ago that he had been mesmerized in truth, and nothing he could now tell her could make her believe otherwise. Twain draws the bitter moral: “How easy it is to make people believe a lie and how hard it is to undo that work again!” The lie that he had played upon his mother in his youth “remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death.” Twain read the Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle all his life. Reflecting on this experience, he recalled Carlyle’s maxim that “a lie cannot live.” Twain concludes: “[I]t shows that he did not know how to tell them.”
