MARK TWAIN GAVE AMERICA ITS VOICES.
The Oxford Mark Twain
29 volumes | Oxford University Press
And watching over this whole silent, riotous scene, this Western projected onto the empty streets of the little town, was an ageless young-old man with a mustache and piercing, kindly eyes -- he must have floated up from the white statue that stood in the town park. If asked, I couldn't have said for sure whether he had recorded the scene or created it. He was just there, as much a part of the scenery as the hitching posts. Then there was grandpa. Somewhere along the way Mark Twain had gotten into him, too -- gotten into his speech, anyway. When the old man would say, as he looked laconically at a particularly rare piece of meat, "I've seen cows hurt worse than that will get better," I felt Mark Twain looking gravely on. When my cousin and I were trying to wake up one morning to go pick the lower apple orchard and grandpa commented sympathetically, "When you're asleep you're really living -- when you're awake you're only existing," my stepfather may have sputtered in Calvinist outrage, but I was aware that Twain approved the maxim from his perch somewhere in the bearskin on the cabin wall. I took a tolerably large pride in my close personal ties to Mr. Clemens. But that pride fell off considerably when I realized that he was related to everybody in the country.
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own a personal piece of Mark Twain, like every American. My particular
claim is Western. My mother's parents lived in Angels Camp, Calaveras
County -- a California Gold Country mining town whose sole claim to fame, such as it
is, derives from the story that launched Twain's national reputation, "The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." We used to go up there
several times a year. Angels Camp was, and still is, a sleepy little town tucked
away in the Sierra foothills, but as a boy I imagined it as what I
conceived it to be in Twain's day -- a roistering frontier town filled with
horny-handed miners, mountebanks (I wasn't quite sure what a "mountebank"
was, but I liked the sound of the word) and a constant squadron of
desperadoes flying, as horizontal as Superman, out of saloon doors.
