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 piece of gossip about themselves they let stand because the truth was worse.
2. 00:11
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Miss Austen, I understand you once let the world believe you were a man. Or rather, you let them guess at it, which is nearly as entertaining.
3. 00:20
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I published anonymously, Mr. Clemens. That is hardly the same as impersonation. The title pages read 'By a Lady,' which was perfectly accurate, if not terribly specific.
4. 00:31
   Mark Twainshare moment

   But you didn't correct them when they said your brother Henry wrote the novels, did you? I seem to recall some confusion on that point persisting for years.
5. 00:40
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Henry was my banker, my negotiator, and occasionally my nurse. He did not write a word of my fiction, though he was helpful in extracting payment from publishers. The confusion arose because men could not conceive that a woman might write about money and entailment with any accuracy.
6. 00:56
   Mark Twainshare moment

   And you let them think it.
7. 00:57
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I did. Because the alternative was to reveal that I lived in a Hampshire cottage with my mother and sister, eavesdropping on every visitor and hoarding their conversations like a miser hoards coin. That I had no life, Mr. Clemens. Only observation.
8. 01:13
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well now, that's a peculiar thing to be ashamed of. Most writers I know would confess to worse.
9. 01:19
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Most writers you know are men, and may live as they please. A woman who admits to spending her days dissecting her neighbors' follies for profit is not charming. She is unsettling.
10. 01:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So you let them believe your brother had the wit, and you had the penmanship. That's a sight better than what they said about me, I suppose.
11. 01:39
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And what did they say about you?
12. 01:41
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That I was a drunk. Which I was, on occasion, but not nearly as often as reported. The newspapers loved to print that Mark Twain had been found insensible in some San Francisco gutter, and I rarely bothered to correct them.
13. 01:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Why not?
14. 01:57
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Because the truth was I was avoiding creditors, Miss Austen. I was running from debt like a dog runs from firecrackers. A man who's drunk is pitiable. A man who owes money to half of California is contemptible.
15. 02:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I see. Better the fool than the failure.
16. 02:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Precisely. Besides, the drunk story had legs. People would tell it at dinner parties. A bankruptcy is just depressing.
17. 02:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You speak of it lightly now, but I suspect it was not light then.
18. 02:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    No, ma'am, it was not. I lost a fortune on a typesetting machine that never worked. Spent years lecturing across the globe to pay back every cent, and my wife Livy's health suffered for it. But if the newspapers wanted to say I was sleeping off whiskey in a boarding house, well, that was nobody's business but mine.
19. 02:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And your wife's.
20. 02:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And Livy's. You're right. She knew the truth, and that was enough. Or it had to be.
21. 02:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is a peculiar mathematics, is it not? The measurement of what one can bear versus what one's reputation can bear. I found the latter had more elasticity than the former.
22. 03:04
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Meaning?
23. 03:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Meaning I could endure being thought a literary curiosity, my brother's creature, a spinster with a clever turn of phrase. I could not endure being known as a woman who had refused a proposal of marriage one evening and retracted her refusal the next morning in a fit of panic about money.
24. 03:23
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You did that?
25. 03:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did. Harris Bigg-Wither. Dreadful name, pleasant man, good income. I accepted him to secure my mother and sister's future, then lay awake all night realizing I would rather be poor than married to someone I could not respect. I told him the next morning. We never spoke of it publicly.
26. 03:42
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And folks said what, instead?
27. 03:44
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That I was too particular. Too proud. That I preferred my books to human company, which was partially true and wholly more palatable than the reality.
28. 03:55
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Which was that you'd rather gamble on your own wits than sell yourself for security.
29. 03:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I would not have phrased it so boldly, but yes.
30. 04:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Nothing bold about it, Miss Austen. That's just horse sense. Though I admit I've made the opposite error more than once, marrying my fortune to bad investments because I thought I was smarter than I was.
31. 04:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You were smart enough to pay your debts. Many men in your position would have simply vanished, begun again under another name. You did not.
32. 04:24
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Couldn't do that to Livy. She married a man with a name, not a snake-oil peddler. Though I suppose Mark Twain was a kind of alias to begin with.
33. 04:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Samuel Clemens died so Mark Twain could be born?
34. 04:36
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Something like that. Sam Clemens was a riverboat pilot who might've amounted to nothing. Mark Twain was whoever I needed him to be. Funny thing is, after a while, I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
35. 04:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. I understand that rather well.
36. 04:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You signed your name to the novels eventually, didn't you? After you'd already passed.
37. 04:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My nephew arranged it. A posthumous edition with my name on the title page, as if I might finally be safe from judgment once I was beyond its reach. I confess I do not know if I would have done it myself, had I lived.
38. 05:09
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Probably not. Once you've let a lie do its work, it feels ungrateful to contradict it.
39. 05:14
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And yet the lie never quite fits, does it? It chafes. One spends years adjusting to its shape.
40. 05:21
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's the price, I reckon. You buy your privacy with a piece of the truth, and then you've got to live in the house you built. Mine had a saloon in it, even though I was usually upstairs working.
41. 05:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And mine had a brother in the parlor, taking credit for my sentences. Though he did handle the publishers rather well.
42. 05:39
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Did it ever gall you? Watching him collect the praise?
43. 05:43
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Henry never claimed authorship. He merely failed to correct the assumption. And no, it did not gall me. I was writing, Mr. Clemens. That was the point. The praise was incidental.
44. 05:55
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Now that I don't believe for a second. You're telling me you didn't care if they knew it was you?
45. 06:00
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I cared. But I cared more about continuing to write. Anonymity purchased freedom. Notoriety would have purchased only scrutiny, and scrutiny is the death of observation. One cannot watch a room one is required to perform in.
46. 06:16
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's the smartest thing I've heard all week. I spent half my life performing, and the other half wishing I'd kept my mouth shut.
47. 06:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You are performing now.
48. 06:26
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Yes, ma'am, I am. Difference is, I'm dead, so it doesn't cost me anything anymore.
49. 06:31
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A comforting thought. Though I suspect we are both performing versions of ourselves that are still, in some measure, lies.
50. 06:38
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Probably. But they're our lies now, and that's the privilege of the grave. Nobody left alive to contradict us.
51. 06:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Except each other.
52. 06:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Except each other. Though I wouldn't dare contradict a lady. Especially one who writes better than I do.
53. 06:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Flattery, Mr. Clemens, is merely truth told slant.
54. 06:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Then I'll tell it straight: You let them think you were someone else because the truth would've stopped you working. I let them think I was drunk because the truth would've stopped them listening. We both chose the useful lie.
55. 07:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And do you regret it?
56. 07:13
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Not for a minute. You?
57. 07:14
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Not at all. Though I should like to have seen Henry's face when they finally put my name on the books.
58. 07:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I expect he smiled. Brothers usually do, once they've stopped being useful.