Above, from top: Gravemarker for Isaiah Sellers in Missouri; Twain on a riverboat; signatures as Clemens and Twain; a Remington catalog from the 1880s; Remington typewriter inventor (and newspaper publisher) Christopher Latham Sholes.
Like many of his books, Mark Twain’s 1883 travelogue Life on the Mississippi was published simultaneously in England and the U.S. in an attempt to ensure against piracy on either side of the Atlantic. In it, Twain recounts—among other stories from his young life on the river—the origin of and his decision to use the pen name “Mark Twain” instead of his given name, Samuel Clemens.
Chapter 50 introduces a captain Twain writes is “now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river.” But he’s a two-sided figure: an able sailor on one hand, but a competitive storyteller on the other. His tales were designed to outdo all the rest. As older pilots bragged about their experiences on the river to newer men, Twain writes, “the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst.” Capt. Sellers “dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before.” Twain continues,
The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them “Mark Twain,” and give them to the New Orleans Picayune. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as “disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.”
In an effort to impress his fellow young pilots, Twain signed his first article for the New Orleans True Delta, which was a parody of the captain’s style with his name, “I. Sellers.” When he found out, Sellers “did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth,” Twain recalls.
He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed “Mark Twain” to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.
Like Jonathan Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaff or Benjamin Franklin’s Richard Saunders, Clemens used a pen name to antagonize a competitor. And like Dickens’s Boz—which came from “the nickname of a pet child, a younger brother, whom I had dubbed Moses, […] which, being pronounced Bozes, got shortened to Boz”— Clemens kept a pen name not out of spite but as a memento of his youth, a souvenir. Mark Twain represented the best storyteller of them all, casting a long shadow over the young Clemens. Clemens’s nom de plume was not a mask, but a goal. It created another, separate author inside himself. Finally, like copyright, the serial format, and the printing press, Twain’s pseudonym was a text-generating tool: with it, he could make more text and better text at a faster rate than he ever could as Samuel Clemens.
Beyond revealing the origin of his name, however, Twain’s Life on the Mississippi was unique for another reason: it was the first manuscript to be composed entirely on a typewriter, the Remington Model 2. The typewriter was Twain’s second. He’d purchased a Remington Model 1 in 1874, just seven years after Christopher Latham Sholes, working with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, had invented it. Sholes described his contraption as “a cross between a loom and a jack-in-the-box, but it could operate faster than a man could with a pen, and all the letters were legible.” Sholes’s typewriter was not the first—a British inventor named George Mill had filed a patent for a “writing-machine” shortly after the passage of the Statue of Anne in 1714—but it was the first to be industrially produced.
Since the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, the famous firearms manufacturers E. Remington & Sons had turned their wartime production line to the production of domestic goods, like sewing machines. Remington’s engineers felt many of the same technologies developed for the sewing machine could be applied to the typewriter. Their version of Sholes’s machine sat on a stand “similar to a sewing machine table,” according to a 1977 IBM press release on the typewriter’s history, and “the carriage was returned by means of a foot-treadle.” Remington’s advertising noted that the typewriter was “the size of a sewing machine, and an ornament to an office, study, or sitting room.”
The similarity to the sewing machine may explain why society was so quick to train women to use the new technology. By 1878, the year the Remington 2 was introduced, schools in New York offered typing courses for students, and soon after that the New York YWCA began offering secretarial instruction to young ladies. Female stenographers would soon be found in better hotels and office supply shops throughout the country, and it was just such a woman who first cast a spell on Twain with the new machine and prompted him to buy it. In his unpublished autobiography—a set of sheets dictated, of course, to a secretary with the aid of a typewriter—Twain recounts his purchase:
Nasby and I saw the machine through a window, and went in to look at it. The salesman explained it to us, showed us samples of its work, and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute—a statement which we frankly confessed that we did not believe. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. […] She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we pocketed them as fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities. The price of the machine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I bought one, and we went away very much excited. At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed to find that they contained the same words. The girl had economized time and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart.
But Twain’s Remington Model 1 was “full of defects—devilish ones,” and he was eager to get rid of it. He gave it first to his friend Howells, who “was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly towards them, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered. He kept it six months, and then returned it to me.” Twain then tried to unload it on his coachman, Patrick McAleer, “who was very grateful, because he did not know the animal, and I thought I was trying to make him wiser and better. As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of its history ends.” Passing, like Twain’s own pen name, from one person to the next, it seemed the Remington Model 1 had a mind of its own.
Serial Series is a six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point-of-view. It was written serially and published serially during the three-week run of Dexter Sinister’s The First/Last Newspaper, a project for Performa 09. The fifth broadsheet, including this piece (titled CAP’N SELLERS’S PEN NAME STOLEN) can be downloaded here. The final installment will be posted on Tuesday, 5 January 2010.
