Excerpt 

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On advising students...

 

Maybe sometimes I go too far.  I received a letter from a former student; her plaintive epistle began “Dear Cocksucker,” and went on to say, “You told me I could write.  I can’t.  I’ve wasted ten years of my life trying.  Fuck you.”  So I wrote her back, “Hang in there.”

 

From Mark Twain chapter, regarding the origin of the “celebrity roast”...

 

A joke can backfire.  You say something you thought was funny and instead of a laugh you get an icy silent stare.  My all-time favorite example of this calamity is Mark Twain’s speech at Whittier’s 70th birthday banquet in Boston, December 17, 1877.  And Mark Twain was taking his own “worst advice,” he was supremely being himself.  As Ron Powers puts it, Mark Twain succeeded in making “as shining an ass of himself as at any time over the long course of his life.”  And it led to a “thunderbolt of shame and remorse.” 

 

On that fateful winter night Mark Twain ran headlong into his own profound ambivalence about “Sivilization” and respectability.  He was 42, “The Wild Humorist of the West”; but he had been “put under instruction not to shock the august company by making fun of cherished ideals.”  So, of course, he did exactly that.  (And thus, Ron Powers suggests, unwittingly “inaugurated a venerable institution of American popular culture: the celebrity roast.”)

 

…Tribute after tribute, far into the night, and finally Clemens rose and shared with the unsuspecting audience a tall tale, a “roast” of the dignified guests:

 

I knocked at a miner’s lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall.  A jaded melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened to me.  When he heard my nom de plume, he looked more dejected than ever.  ‘You’re the fourth—I’m a going to move.”  ‘The fourth what?’ said I.  ‘The fourth litery man that’s been here in twenty-four hours—I’m a’going to move.’  ‘You don’t tell me!’ said I, ‘who were the others?’  ‘Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—dad fetch the lot!’

 

Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes—all three- were seated right there at the head table in the banquet hall.  Twain had his miner describe them all, grotesquely, especially Holmes, “fat as a balloon—he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach”….

 

…It didn’t go over so well.  Years later Mark Twain remembered that the faces of the audience “turned to a sort of black frost.”  He gamely continued, waiting for somebody—anybody—to laugh, “at least smile, but nobody did.”  William Dean Howells, the master of ceremonies, said the speech provoked only “a silence weighing many tons to the square inch.”  Even worse, a delicious detail, the stony silence was broken, Howells added, “by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest.”  Howells had to lead Twain away to suffer alone in his hotel room.  Howells called the speech “a bewildering blunder,” a “cruel catastrophe.”  Mark Twain “felt the awfulness of what he was doing, but was fatally helpless to stop.”  It was “a case of demonical possession.” 

 

…The newspapers took it up: “Mark Twain’s Offence Against Good Taste,” “Mark Twain’s Mistake at the Whittier Dinner,” and for thirty years he kept on arguing with himself about it:

 

     Nobody has ever convinced me that the speech was not a good one… I could

     as easily have substituted the names of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Ben

     Johnson… My purpose was clean, my conscience clear.

 

As late as 1906 he was still fussing about it:

 

     I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn’t a single defect from the

     first word to the last.  It is just as good as good can be.  It is smart; it is

     saturated with humor.  There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it

     anywhere.   

 

But a few days later:

 

     I have examined that speech a couple of times since, and have changed my

     mind about it—changed it entirely.  I find it gross, coarse… I didn’t like any

     part of it, from the beginning to the end.  I found it always offensive and

     detestable.  How do I account for this change of view?  I don’t know.  I can’t

     account for it… I expect this latest verdict to remain.

 

But on a typescript is a footnote in his handwriting:

 

     May 25th (1906)  It did remain—until day before yesterday; then I gave it a

     final and vigorous reading—aloud—and dropped straight back to my favorite

     admiration of it.  MT.