Twain×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Mark Twain and Jane Austen, on On their actual hourly schedule on a working day.
2. 00:09
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Miss Austen, I understand you were an early riser. Now, I've always maintained that no man who had to be anywhere before ten in the morning was ever worth a damn, and I include myself in that assessment.
3. 00:21
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I was indeed an early riser, Mr. Clemens, though not from any particular virtue. In a household of eight or nine persons, one writes when one can, and the morning hours were mine by default—no one else wanted them.
4. 00:34
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Sensible people, your family. I've spent half my life running from breakfast invitations.
5. 00:39
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I was downstairs by seven, most mornings. There was the fire to see to in the drawing room, and correspondence to attend to before the household properly began its day.
6. 00:50
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Seven o'clock. Good Lord. What time did you go to bed, woman?
7. 00:53
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Ten or eleven, usually. Earlier if we had no company.
8. 00:56
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, that explains how you wrote six novels in a parlor with the door open. You had the hours. I didn't generally achieve consciousness until nine-thirty, and even then it was under protest.
9. 01:09
   Jane Austenshare moment

   And when did you begin your work?
10. 01:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Oh, ten-thirty, eleven. Sometimes noon if I'd been sociable the night before. I'd go up to my study—octagonal room, windows all around, quite nice—and I'd smoke and write until the dinner bell at five or so.
11. 01:25
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Five hours, then. Consecutively?
12. 01:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    On a good day, yes. On a bad day I'd smoke more and write less. The ratio varied.
13. 01:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I had no study. I wrote in the general sitting room at a small table, and if anyone came in, I simply put a blotter over the page. My morning hours were perhaps two or three, interrupted frequently.
14. 01:45
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You wrote your novels two hours at a time, with people walking in and out?
15. 01:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did. And I revised them the same way. There was no door to shut, and I would not have shut it if there were—it would have excited curiosity.
16. 01:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Miss Austen, that is the most appalling working condition I have ever heard described, and I once wrote a book on the Mississippi River with a pilot cussing in my ear.
17. 02:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It was not ideal, certainly. But a woman of my station did not absent herself from family life to pursue what must have appeared, to most observers, a peculiar and possibly unwholesome hobby.
18. 02:21
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Unwholesome. The reading public has been devouring your books for a hundred years, and your family thought you were indulging in something unwholesome.
19. 02:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My family was quite supportive, actually. My father encouraged me, and my sister Cassandra was an unfailing ally. But discretion was necessary. One does not announce one's literary ambitions at the breakfast table like a manifesto.
20. 02:43
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I announced mine in the newspaper. Seemed efficient.
21. 02:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You were a man, Mr. Clemens, and an American. You could afford to announce things.
22. 02:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Fair point. So you wrote from seven to nine or ten in the morning, hidden in plain sight. What did you do the rest of the day?
23. 02:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Everything else that required doing. I practiced the pianoforte, I walked, I paid calls, I received them. I did needlework, which I despised but which was expected. I read aloud in the evenings. I managed the household accounts when my mother was unwell.
24. 03:15
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And you never told anyone to go to hell so you could finish a chapter?
25. 03:19
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Not in those words, no.
26. 03:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I told people to go to hell regularly. It's one of the few reliable pleasures of the writing life.
27. 03:26
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You had a study with a door, Mr. Clemens. And a wife who managed your household. And publishers who came to you. The architecture of your day was entirely different from mine.
28. 03:37
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I did have Livy, God rest her, and she was a marvel. She kept the world at bay so I could work. Though she also kept me from publishing some of my best invective, so it was a mixed blessing.
29. 03:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I kept my own invective private, in letters to Cassandra. Most of which she burned after my death, probably wisely.
30. 03:57
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Burned them! That's a crime against posterity.
31. 04:00
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It was an act of discretion. I said things in letters that would have been imprudent to preserve.
32. 04:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I said things in books that were imprudent to preserve, and they published them anyway. Different times.
33. 04:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Indeed. Tell me, did you write every day, or only when the spirit moved you?
34. 04:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I wrote when I had a contract and a deadline, mostly. Or when I was broke, which amounted to the same thing. But when I was in the middle of something, I wrote daily, yes. Five or six days a week, anyway.
35. 04:32
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote when I could, which was most mornings, unless we had house guests or were traveling. I revised constantly, whenever I had a few minutes alone. I carried the work in my head all day.
36. 04:43
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So did I, come to think of it. I'd be at dinner thinking about a paragraph, and Livy would have to kick me under the table to bring me back.
37. 04:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I was once so absorbed in working out a plot difficulty that I walked past my own gate and had to be retrieved by my brother. He was not amused.
38. 05:01
    Mark Twainshare moment

    What did you do in the afternoons, after your morning work was done?
39. 05:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I lived, Mr. Clemens. I walked to Alton or Chawton village. I gossiped with my nieces. I observed the world that I would write about the next morning. A novel requires material, and material requires attention.
40. 05:18
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I took naps, mostly. And smoked. And occasionally read the newspaper to see what lies they were telling that day.
41. 05:25
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You had leisure, in other words.
42. 05:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I had solitude, which is different. And I paid for it with lecture tours and public readings that nearly killed me. You never had to do that, did you?
43. 05:37
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I never lectured, no. I was never asked. My books were published anonymously for most of my life—'By A Lady'—and I met exactly none of my readers. I lived unknown and died obscure.
44. 05:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And now you're probably more famous than I am, at least in England. There's a justice in that.
45. 05:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps. Though I notice you made a great deal more money than I did during your lifetime.
46. 05:59
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And lost most of it in idiotic investments. Typesetting machines, mostly. You were probably better off with your hundred and forty pounds per novel.
47. 06:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I made less than seven hundred pounds from my writing in my entire life, Mr. Clemens. One does not call that 'better off.'
48. 06:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    No, I suppose one doesn't. I apologize. That was thoughtless.
49. 06:20
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is simply the truth. I wrote as I could, when I could, with what I had. And I finished the work, which is more than many people manage.
50. 06:28
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's all any of us can do, really. Show up at the desk—or the drawing room table—and put the words down until something like a book appears.
51. 06:37
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Precisely. Whether one begins at seven in the morning or eleven, whether one has a study or a blotter, the work is the same. One writes the next sentence, and then the one after that.
52. 06:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Though I still think seven o'clock is uncivilized.
53. 06:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And I remain convinced that a man who begins at noon has already wasted half his day.
54. 06:56
    Mark Twainshare moment

    We'll have to agree to disagree on that point, Miss Austen.
55. 06:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I expect we shall, Mr. Clemens. It has not prevented either of us from finishing our work.
56. 07:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    No, it hasn't. Though I'd have given a lot to see you tell your family to go to hell just once.
57. 07:10
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I expressed the sentiment in my novels, Mr. Clemens. Merely more politely.