After researching the Whittier Dinner Speech for only a short time I’ve already found a couple references suggesting that Twain’s description of that night was at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright lie. Apparently the speech did not cause the night to come to an abrupt and uncomfortable end, and according to The Boston Daily Globe the speech even “produced the most violent bursts of hilarity.” It’s true that it didn’t go over as well as he had expected, but it didn’t flop to the extent that he described.
So why did Twain go as far as he did to paint the situation as this horrible calamity? My guess is that in his mind the experience was far worse then it was in reality. Everyone has those moments where you do something completely embarrassing and it sticks with you long after everyone else has long forgotten about it. This was probably one of those moments for Twain, and he wanted to convey his feelings rather then give a factual account.
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5 comments:
I agree with you Adam. Twain did exaggerate the bad effects of his speech. I have read "Howells' My Mark Twain" and found that there was in fact one guest who found Twain's speech funny and laughed hysterically -- unlike what Twain says in his autobiography that he was "hoping somebody would laugh, or at least smile, but nobody did." Maybe you are right, since he thought that he had told a bad joke to a wrong crowd, he felt embarrassed as a humorist, so that he exaggerated a whole lot to convey his feelings after all those years.
There is a lot of good reason to exaggerate when telling a story... One that is told with journalistic precision would be boring. And Twain was a master storyteller.
With that in mind, I'm hesitant to leap to the conclusion that what he wrote was an outright lie. Were there other accounts that provide some basis (however flimsy) for the story he told?
Although Twian does appear to exaggerate much about the account at the dinner, is this not also a part of his style? I consider Tiwan's manipulation of the story is very smartly handled in order to create a sense of illusion.
But I can also see the possibility for Twian perceive his performance as a total failure that he felt so mortified by it.
Thanks for posting.
I'm tempted to believe that Twain wasn't deliberately trying to make an entertaining story through manipulation of the details as much as he was describing a memory which had been throughly corrupted with the passage of time. He was dissatisfied with the reception of the speech, and that much had stuck in his memory after 30 years. It's easy to see how the specifics of the events could have been misremembered so as to support the conclusion that it was a remarkably embarrassing moment in his life
I think that the discrepancies in Twain's recollection of that night are too large to attribute to faded memory. I could possibly accept the faded memory theory if the only differences had been in the details about how his speech was received. However, the whole portion with Bishop and the night coming to an end because of his off-color speech is going a little too far to blame on his memory. I doubt he could have imagined that entire series of events in such detail.
I agree that Twain likely altered the story to make it more entertaining. I find that to be a problem and it’s why I feel somewhat justified in considering him a bit of a liar. This story wasn’t in a book of fiction, it was in his autobiography. While it’s nice for an autobiography to be entertaining that entertainment shouldn’t come as a result of misinformation. With the knowledge that Twain likes to distort the facts, the rest of his autobiography has to be examined to determine which parts are there for entertainment and which parts are there because they are factual.
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