- “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” Mark Twain.
I once eschewed buses and taxis and travelled to school by rail. In this context, and this alone, you can say that I was well-trained. During that time, I fell in love with the works of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, notably “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Pudd’nhead Wilson.” This means that I was also well Twained, so well-twained in fact that I know that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.” Clemens is best known as the American Humorist “Mark Twain.”
Twain was a character in every sense of the word and words that I love like, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow,” “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat,”; and “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” It did matter when after walking 130 miles to Virginia City, Nevada, he said, “My name is Clemens, and I’ve come to write for this paper.” It was only when he finally stuck to being a professional writer, he took the pseudonym “Mark Twain” from the term used by rivermen for water that was just barely deep enough for safe navigation.
Another great writer, Rudyard Kipling, in his “Ballad of East and West” wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” He was wrong. Twain and I met many, many years later in Bermuda. While I was neither East nor West but a total West Indian Caribbean man, the meeting with Twain, while defying Kipling and logic, was pre-ordained. Most of my friends and readers laughed when I claimed that I met Twain.
After all, he had died in 1910 when I was not even a gleam in my father’s eye but as Twain had said long before he died: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn’t.” I told those who doubted me that Nat King Cole sang along with his daughter in 1991 although he had died in 1965 and what they did was “Unforgettable.” So, who is me? Especially with the Twain coming down the track. In fact, as I will be 80 years old three months from now, he and I are together again for the benefit of our friends and readers. As he told me, “The fear of death follows the fear of life. A man who lives full is prepared to die at any time.” In fact, meeting Twain again is more than enough.
I went to Bermuda to attend a meeting of Caribbean statisticians. While my arrival was not entirely propitious, my stay was much better. The warmth of the people should not be judged by either their Immigration Department or foreign hoteliers. Most Bermudans have Caribbean roots, and we get along brilliantly. It is why I felt I could pull the legs of the participants a bit by introducing my presentation with a quote from Mark Twain, “Statistics are like ladies of the night. Once you get them down you can do anything with them.” Of course, I was careful to point out that I was merely quoting Twain because the subjects under consideration were outside the range of my personal experience. What I did recall, without remarking on it, was that Twain expressed this same thought more conservatively.
In his autobiography, he wrote, “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” He also said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” Then he made it clear that many people used statistics the way a drunken man uses a lamppost- for support rather than illumination.
For illumination, I once more share my meeting with Mark Twain on a bench in the lobby of the hotel. It was dark and I saw this old bewhiskered gentleman of bronze complexion seated there. “Nice tan,” I thought. I had almost stepped on his booted foot, and I said, “Excuse me, sir.” The lack of any response was not due to anger.
Twain had kept his composure because of his composition. That had nothing to do with whether he essayed a reply or not. It was because he was made entirely of bronze. As I looked at the three-piece suit in which he was cast, I remembered his witticisms, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society,” and “Strip the human race absolutely naked and it would be a real democracy.” Just meeting the statue made me feel that my visit to Bermuda was unforgettable. However, I started wondering about Twain himself. While the statue was meant to display Twain’s love for Bermuda (“keep Paradise, give me Bermuda”), the ostentatious display was more consistent with his view that “in the country of the blind the one-eyed man would probably be in a circus.”
I figured that putting him on the show was something that came from a group he totally despised- POLITICIANS!
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” he wrote. He also said: “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet,” and “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” He even seemed to be prescient about present day American politics, “Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them;and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” With several countries of the Caribbean about to hold their national elections, I might take a Twain to nowhere.
This is why I was so happy meeting the great Twain. He was at the same time both a cynic, and an optimist. “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices,” he said sincerely. “All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”
* Tony Deyal was last seen in Bermuda lamenting the high markup on books there and throughout the Caribbean. He quoted Twain who wrote in The Prince and the Pauper, “When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”
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