The power of association to bring back a lost word or name, as shown on the Bermuda trip when Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twichell recall Miss Kirkham’s name—Mr. Clemens’s dream, born of the association of Mr. Twichell’s remarks about aerial navigation and the reading of the statistics of the railway accidents compiled by the United StatesⒶtextual note Government.
“That reminds me.” In conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never noticing how large a significance it bears. It stands for a curious and interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking, the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly, almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of incidents and episodes of our past. A manⒶtextual note can never know whatⒶtextual note a large trafficⒶtextual note this commerce of association carries onⒶtextual note in his mindⒶtextual note until he sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event, large or small, in his past experience. Quite naturally these present remarksⒶtextual note remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any other process known to your mental equipment. Yesterday we had an instance of this.
ReverendⒶtextual note Joseph H. TwichellⒶtextual note is with me on this flying trip to Bermuda. He was with me on my last visit to BermudaⒺexplanatory note, and to-day we were trying to remember when it was; weⒶtextual note thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get at the date. TwichellⒶtextual note said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us theⒶtextual note date, and we must look her up. We wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her blooming daughter of eighteen were the only persons whose acquaintance we had made at that time, for we were travelingⒶtextual note under fictitious names, and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and bringing themselves under suspicion. But at this point in our talk we encountered an obstruction:Ⓐtextual note we could not recall the landlady’s name. We hunted all aroundⒶtextual note through our minds for that name, using all the customary methods of research, but without success; the name was [begin page 360] gone from us, apparently permanently. We finally gave the matter up, and fell to talking about something else. The talk wandered from one subject to another, and finally arrived at Twichell’sⒶtextual note school daysⒶtextual note in Hartford—the Hartford of something more than half a century ago—and he mentioned several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the peculiarities of an aged one named Olney. He remarked that Olney, humble village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in America in their day. I said I remembered those books, and had studied “Olney’s Geography”Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note in school when I was a boy. Then TwichellⒶtextual note said,
“That reminds me—our landlady’s name was a name that was associated with school-books of some kind or otherⒶtextual note fifty or sixty years ago. I wonder what it was. I believe it began with K.”
Association did the rest, and did it instantly. I said,Ⓐtextual note
“Kirkham’s Grammar!Ⓐtextual note”Ⓔexplanatory note
That settled it. Kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the owner of it. There was no trouble about that, for Bermuda is not large, and is like the earlier Garden of Eden, in that everybody in it knows everybody else, just as it was in the serpent’s headquartersⒶtextual note in Adam’s time. We easily found Miss Kirkham—she that had been the blooming girl of a generation before—and she was still keeping boardersⒺexplanatory note; but her mother had passed from this life. She settled the date for us, and did it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events of that ancient time. She said we had sailed from Bermuda on the 24th of MayⒶtextual note 1877,Ⓐtextual note which was the day on which her only nephew was bornⒺexplanatory note—and he is now thirty years of age. The other unusual circumstance—she called it an unusual circumstance, and I didn’t say anything—was that on that day the Rev. Mr. TwichellⒶtextual note (bearing the assumed name of Peters) had made a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. I remembered the circumstance very well. We had bidden the young girl good-byeⒶtextual note and had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when Twichell said he had forgotten something (I doubted it,)Ⓐtextual note and must go back. When he rejoined me he was silent, and this alarmed me, because I had not seen an example of it before. He seemed quite uncomfortable, and I asked him what the trouble was. He said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so had gone back and said to her—Ⓐtextual note
“That young fellow’s name is not Wilkinson—that’s Mark TwainⒺexplanatory note.”
She did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit any excitement at all, but said quite simply, quite tranquilly,
“Tell it to the marines, Mr. Peters—if that should happen to be your Ⓐtextual note name.”
It was very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight.
I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like nearly everything else that drifts into a person’s head, asleep or awake. On board ship,Ⓐtextual note on the passage down,Ⓐtextual note TwichellⒶtextual note was talking about the swiftlyⒶtextual note developing possibilities of aerialⒶtextual note navigationⒺexplanatory note, and he quoted those striking verses of Tennyson’s which forecast a future when air-borne [begin page 361] vessels of war shall meet and fightⒺexplanatory note aboveⒶtextual note the clouds and redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnightⒶtextual note ago—statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000Ⓐtextual note miles of railway we annually kill 10,000Ⓐtextual note persons outrightⒶtextual note and injure 80,000Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It was an admirable dream, what there was of it.
InⒶtextual note it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpent-likeⒶtextual note, through a level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by a sombreⒶtextual note flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activitiesⒶtextual note in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000Ⓐtextual note cripples, and wasⒶtextual note bearing its own year’s 10,000Ⓐtextual note mutilated corpses to the grave: in the aggregate 800,000Ⓐtextual note cripples and 100,000Ⓐtextual note dead,Ⓐtextual note drenched in blood!Ⓐtextual note
Reverend Joseph H. Twichell is with me . . . my last visit to Bermuda] Clemens, Twichell, and Isabel Lyon left New York for Bermuda aboard the RMS Bermudian on 2 January; they arrived in Hamilton two days later and registered at the Princess Hotel. They departed for New York, again on the Bermudian, on 7 January. Miss Hobby did not accompany them (Lyon 1907, entries for 2, 4, 7, and 9 Jan; Hoffmann 2006, 69–78). For this dictation and probably the first part of the next (9 January), Lyon took down Clemens’s words in longhand (she did not know shorthand), and Hobby subsequently created the typescript from Lyon’s notes, which have not survived. Clemens, accompanied by Twichell, had last visited Bermuda from 20 to 24 May 1877. His account of the trip, “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” appeared in four installments in the Atlantic Monthly, from October 1877 through January 1878 (SLC 1877–78; for the notebook he kept during the trip, see N&J2, 8–36).
Twichell’s school days in Hartford . . . “Olney’s Geography”] A Practical System of Modern Geography, by Jesse Olney (1798–1872), was first published in 1828. Innovative in its presentation of world geography, and far from neutral in its characterization of ethnic groups, for thirty years it was used in virtually every school in the United States. Revised and enlarged many times, it ran through ninety-eight editions. Olney was a teacher in New York State, and from 1821 to 1831 served as a school principal in Hartford. In 1834 he moved to Southington, where Twichell was born (in 1838) and spent his boyhood. Although Olney thereafter devoted much of his time to writing textbooks, he worked to establish a system of public schools in Connecticut and opened his own “select school” (Timlow 1875, 450; Baker 1996; Courtney 2008, 8–17).
“Kirkham’s Grammar!”] English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, by Samuel Kirkham, first published in 1824, was issued in dozens of editions by several publishers. An 1835 Baltimore edition, designated the “one hundred and fifth,” is now in the Mark Twain Papers, and may have belonged to Clemens during his Hannibal youth (Kirkham 1835; for a discussion of its provenance and authenticity, see Gribben 1980, 1:383–84).
Miss Kirkham . . . was still keeping boarders] Emily Kirkham and her widowed mother, Mary Ann (d. 1894), had run the boardinghouse where Clemens and Twichell stayed in 1877. Emily was then twenty-five (Hoffmann 2006, 35, 74).
the day on which her only nephew was born] Clemens had recorded the birth in his 1877 notebook: “Mrs. Kirkham had a grandchild born to her in the middle of the night—that is, 1 Thursday morning, the Queen’s birthday, May 24” ( N&J2, 32).
Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) . . . name is not Wilkinson—that’s Mark Twain] Twichell traveled on the ship to and from Bermuda under his own name. A “Reverend Mr. Peters” figures in the second installment of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” but he is not Twichell, who is referred to throughout the series as “the Reverend.” Clemens used his middle name, Langhorne, as his alias during most of the trip (Bermuda Royal Gazette [photocopies in CU-MARK, courtesy of Donald Hoffmann]: “Passengers Arrived,” 22 May 1877, 2; “Passengers Sailed,” 29 May 1877, 2; “ ‘Mark Twain,’ the very amusing author . . . ,” 29 May 1877, 2; Twichell 1874–1916, entry for 28 May 1877; Hoffmann 2006, 26, 72).
swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation] Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their first powered flights on 17 December 1903. In early 1908 the War Department awarded them a contract to produce a biplane for $25,000 which could fly a distance of 125 miles at 40 miles per hour.
those striking verses of Tennyson’s which forecast a future when air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight] These lines from “Locksley Hall,” first published in 1842, were frequently quoted in the first years of the twentieth century when aerial navigation was becoming a practical reality (Tennyson 1842, 2:104):
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
| Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
| Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.
At the time of this dictation, George Harvey had just quoted these lines in his “Editor’s Diary” in the North American Review for 21 December 1906 (Harvey 1906, 1330–33).
something which I had read . . . kill 10,000 persons outright and injure 80,000] These figures derive ultimately from the annual report by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had been submitted to Congress on 19 December 1906. When revising this dictation, Clemens increased his original number of people injured; he evidently made the change sometime after 10 January, when he “bought a world almanac & read Railroad accidents in the U.S. for the past nine years.” He repeats the original number—60,000—in his Autobiographical Dictation of 25 February, and although he revised that dictation, he did not correct the number there (“Commerce Commission Reports,” Wall Street Journal, 20 Dec 1906, 7; Thompson 1907, 3–8, 44–45; Lyon 1907, entry for 10 Jan).
Source documents.
TS1 ribbon Typescript, leaves numbered 1609–15, made from Lyon’s notes and revised.TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1609–15, revised.
NAR 21pf Galley proofs of NAR 21, typeset from the revised TS1 carbon (the same extent as NAR 21), ViU.
NAR 21 North American Review 185 (2 August 1907), 695–98: ‘Hamilton . . . 1907’ (359 title); ‘Š“That reminds me.” . . . in blood!’ (359.15–361.16).
Clemens dictated this text in Bermuda. Hobby was not present, but Lyon was, and Clemens is likely to have dictated to her. Presumably her notes were transcribed by Hobby after the party’s return to New York on 9 January 1907. Clemens revised TS1 ribbon, then transferred most of his revisions to TS1 carbon. In two cases, he did not transfer revisions of wording. The alteration of ‘our minds’ to ‘his mind’ (at 359.20), a clear grammatical improvement, and the insertion of ‘present’ (at 359.23) have been adopted, on the assumption that Clemens overlooked both revisions in the copying process. He then further revised TS1 carbon to serve as printer’s copy for an NAR installment. NAR editor David Munro made several revisions of his own, and the dictation was published in NAR, where it followed excerpts from the ADs of 8 November and 8 March 1906.
Marginal Notes on TS1 ribbon and TS1 carbon Concerning Publication in NAR
Jan. 15. SLC
2½ R. pages.