A companion article to: Lift Up The Toilet Seat
A Cable Out Of London, 1897
In May of 1897, a cable went out of London announcing that Mark Twain was dying in poverty. The story moved through New York the way stories moved then — one source, one wire, one editor in a hurry. The papers did not check. They had no reason to. The cable sounded right.
A reporter from the New York Journal tracked Twain down at his house in Chelsea to confirm the obituary and found the corpse working at his desk. The confusion, it turned out, was simple. Twain's cousin, James Ross Clemens, had been seriously ill in London. Two Clemenses, one cable, no second source.
Twain wrote back dryly: the report of my death was an exaggeration. Eight words. No adjective. He did not say greatly. He did not say grossly. He said what was true, and stopped.
The Second Hallucination, 1912
Twain died, for real this time, in 1910. Two years later his authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, published the life.
Somewhere in it Paine improved the famous line. In Paine's telling Twain had told the reporter, with a flourish: Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated. Better cadence. Sharper word. Total invention.
The improved version is the one that entered the language. The original, the one Twain actually wrote, did not. A century of speakers and writers have quoted the line back to itself in a form its author never used.
Twain himself had warned about this. Five months after the London cable, in Following the Equator, he set down the rule of the game. It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. He was describing the mechanism that would, fifteen years later, eat his own most famous sentence.
The Thirteen-Year-Old At The Lectern
I gave my first speech at thirteen. I remember the room, and I remember my legs, which were not entirely under my control. Gravity, that afternoon, won a small skirmish that the audience was kind enough not to mention.
I have been speaking in public for seventy years since. The lesson of that afternoon stayed with me, though it took a while to name it. The man who can tell on himself is the only man you can trust to tell on anyone else. Twain understood this in his bones. The whole machinery of his humor ran on the prior admission that he, the speaker, was the first fool in the room.
A reader will follow such a man almost anywhere, because such a man has already given up the one move that is unforgivable: pretending to be above the joke.
The Two T's
Which brings me to the two T's. The Twain of 1925, a legendary humorist. The T of today, a legendary joke. One earned the laugh by aiming it at himself first. The other is the laugh, and seems to be the last to know.
Twain spent his life being misquoted by people who admired him. The T spends his being quoted accurately by people who cannot believe he said it. The medium is the same. The use is opposite.
The humorist tells a small lie to deliver a large truth. The joke tells a large lie and trusts that the noise of the telling will swamp anyone trying to check.
The humorist trusts the next reader. The joke counts on there being no next reader at all, only this one, right now, inflamed enough not to ask.
Hallucinations, The Mechanism Is Older Than The Machine
Hallucination, the word we have lately given to what large language models do when they make things up with confidence, is not an artifact of the machine. It is at least a hundred and twenty-nine years old, and it was doing fine before silicon. One cable killed Twain in 1897. One biographer rewrote him in 1912.
No model was consulted. The mechanism in both cases was the one Twain named: a confident statement, played without a check, picked up and passed along by people who had no time to look underneath it. The machine has industrialized the practice. It has not invented it.
The remedy in 1897 was the remedy in 1912, and it is the remedy now. Do not trust one cable. Ask many. Watch where they disagree. The disagreement is the signal. The agreement, on a confident invention, is the noise.
Never The Twain Shall Meet
Kipling wrote the line in 1889, and it has been misquoted ever since. Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
People recite it to mean that two opposing things can never be reconciled. Kipling meant the opposite.
The next two lines, which nobody quotes, say that when two strong men stand face to face, there is neither Border, nor Breed, nor Birth.
The poem is about the meeting, not the separation. Twain, in the line, is the old English word for two. It is, by accident of language, also the name Samuel Clemens took from a Mississippi leadsman calling out safe water. Two fathoms. Mark twain.
The pun is free, and I will take it. A country split red against blue by a man who profits from the splitting cannot easily produce the meeting Kipling described.
The humorist and the joke are not two strong men face to face.
They are a craft and its inversion. Twain told on himself so the reader could trust him on everything else. The T has never once told on himself, and asks to be trusted on all of it. Never the twain shall meet, in this case, is finally true — and the misquoted version, sheared from its stanza for a hundred and thirty-seven years, has at last found the situation it actually describes.
The reports of careful reporting's death are greatly exaggerated. So are mine. I am, like Twain in 1897, working at my desk, in reasonable health, and available for the lecture.