Twain×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Mark Twain sits down with Jane Austen for LATE SHOW. The subject — On a friendship that ended badly, and which side they were really on.
2. 00:10
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Miss Austen, I've been thinking about old friends lately. The kind that stick in your craw long after they're gone. You ever have one of those—a friendship that just curdled?
3. 00:22
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I have had the misfortune, Mr. Clemens. There was a young woman in my youth, a neighbor, with whom I shared a great deal of time and what I believed to be mutual affection. Until I discovered that affection had its price, and the currency was my dignity.
4. 00:36
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Now there's a sentence that knows its way around a knife. What'd she do?
5. 00:40
   Jane Austenshare moment

   She betrayed a confidence I had entrusted to her—a private matter regarding my family's circumstances, which were at the time somewhat reduced. Within a fortnight, the intelligence had spread through three parishes. I found myself the object of a species of pity I had not invited and could not escape.
6. 00:59
   Mark Twainshare moment

   That'll do it. Pity's worse than contempt—contempt at least respects you enough to hate you proper.
7. 01:06
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Precisely so. And when I confronted her, she professed astonishment that I should take offense. She had only, she said, been seeking sympathy on my behalf.
8. 01:16
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Lord, I know that dance. 'I was only trying to help.' Which is what folks say when they've helped themselves to your business and want credit for it.
9. 01:25
   Jane Austenshare moment

   You speak from experience, I collect.
10. 01:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I had a fellow—won't name him, he's got enough attention already—who I thought was a friend. We came up together, both of us slinging words for pennies. I helped him when he was down, put in a good word here and there, lent him money I couldn't spare. Then he got his big break.
11. 01:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And proved ungrateful?
12. 01:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Worse. He got grateful in public and resentful in private. Started telling folks I'd held him back, that I was jealous of his success. Meanwhile he was still cashing my checks.
13. 02:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How perfectly detestable. Though I confess, I am not entirely surprised. Success has a curious effect upon the memory. It permits one to recall only the obstacles, never the assistance.
14. 02:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You got that right. But here's the thing that eats at me—I wonder sometimes if I was as good a friend as I remember being. Memory's a great whitewasher. Maybe I was insufferable in my own way, lording my little early successes over him.
15. 02:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is an uncomfortable degree of honesty, Mr. Clemens.
16. 02:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I've gotten old enough to afford it. Were you perfect with your lady friend? Before she spread your business around?
17. 02:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I was not. I will own that I may have been... superior in my manner. She was not bookish, and I fear I did not conceal my opinion that she ought to have been. There is a particular species of cruelty in the young intelligent person who has yet to learn that intelligence alone does not confer virtue.
18. 03:00
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Now that's something. Most folks would rather eat glass than admit they might've been the difficult one.
19. 03:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am not saying I deserved her betrayal. But I am saying I perhaps earned her resentment. The two are not identical, but they are related.
20. 03:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's a fine distinction. Wish I'd thought of it thirty years ago. So what happened after? Did you try to patch it up?
21. 03:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did not. I withdrew, as was my habit. Cassandra—my sister—urged me to speak with her, but I could not. The wound was too fresh, and I was too proud. And then time passed, as it does, and the opportunity for reconciliation passed with it.
22. 03:40
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And you regret that now?
23. 03:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I regret the waste of it. We were both young and foolish in different ways, and neither of us had the wisdom to see past our own injuries. But I do not regret the ending itself. Some friendships, I think, are meant to be outgrown. The mistake is in believing we must outgrow them with grace.
24. 03:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, that's a cheering thought. So we're allowed to make a hash of it?
25. 04:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I believe we are guaranteed to make a hash of it. The question is whether we learn anything from the hash.
26. 04:09
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I tried to patch things up with my fellow, years later. Wrote him a letter that I thought was pretty magnanimous—allowed as how we'd both been young fools, et cetera. He wrote back saying he didn't recall any particular difficulty between us and hoped I was well.
27. 04:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Good heavens. That is almost artistic in its cruelty.
28. 04:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Isn't it? Like being erased. I'd rather he'd told me to go to hell—at least that would've meant I'd registered.
29. 04:34
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps that is the final revenge of the injured party—to forget entirely. To render the friendship so insignificant in retrospect that even its ending merits no remark.
30. 04:46
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You think he really forgot, or was he just pretending?
31. 04:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Does it matter? The effect is identical.
32. 04:52
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I suppose it doesn't. Though it matters to me, somehow. I'd like to think I made enough of a dent that he at least had to work at forgetting me.
33. 05:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Mr. Clemens, that is vanity speaking.
34. 05:03
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Of course it is. I'm vain as a peacock and always have been. But vanity don't make it wrong.
35. 05:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    No, but it makes it unproductive. Whether he forgot you naturally or with effort, you are equally forgotten. The only question is whether you will forget him—or continue to gnaw on this old bone.
36. 05:21
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You got a cold way of putting things, Miss Austen.
37. 05:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have been told as much. But I notice you have not contradicted me.
38. 05:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's because you're right, damn it. I have been chewing on it too long. Man can't live his life waiting for people to remember they done him wrong.
39. 05:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Nor waiting for them to acknowledge that we did them wrong, which I suspect is the harder admission. I find myself wondering, occasionally, whether my former friend ever thinks of me at all. And then I wonder why I should wish her to.
40. 05:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Because we want to matter. Even in our exits, we want to leave a mark.
41. 05:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. And that, I think, is the true vanity—not that we wish to be remembered fondly, but that we cannot bear to be forgotten, even by those we claim not to care for.
42. 06:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You're making me feel seen in ways I didn't come here to feel seen.
43. 06:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I do apologize. It was not my intention to discomfort you. Though I confess I am somewhat discomforted myself.
44. 06:16
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Good. Means we're getting somewhere honest. So let me ask you straight—you ever figure out whose fault it really was? Yours or hers?
45. 06:26
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I spent many years attempting to calculate that precise proportion. I have since concluded it is the wrong question. Fault, like most things in human relations, does not distribute itself with mathematical precision.
46. 06:40
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So what's the right question?
47. 06:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps it is this: did I behave as well as I might have done, given what I knew and who I was? And the answer, I am afraid, is no.
48. 06:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Same here. I could've been kinder. Could've been less proud. Could've seen his side of things instead of just nursing my grievances like they were prize pigs.
49. 07:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is a remarkable image.
50. 07:03
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I'm from Missouri. We think in agricultural terms. But you know what I mean.
51. 07:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I do. And I think we have arrived at something resembling wisdom, though it has taken us both the better part of a lifetime to reach it.
52. 07:16
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Better late than never, I suppose. Though 'never' is coming up fast for both of us.
53. 07:21
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then let us at least say we learned it. That is something.
54. 07:25
    Mark Twainshare moment

    It is something. Not much, but something.