“Editorial Wild Oats”

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 2, 13 January 1906, Page 49

“Editorial Wild Oats”

“Editorial Wild Oats” is the title of a book by Mark Twain fresh from the press. It is printed in very large type on very small pages, but even so, it is only eighty pages long, and can be read in an hour, says an American magazine. But it is certainly funny. The sketches —which have all appeared in print one time or another —-are elaborate burlesques on country journalism of the days when Mark Twain was a boy, and are certain to amuse all old-timers among editors. A fair sample of the style and matter is the account of “my first literary venture”: I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen —an unusually smart child, I thought at the time. My uncle bad me on his paper (the weekly “Hannibal Journal,” two dollars a year, in advance—live hundred subscribers, and they paid in Cordwood, cabbages and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ab! didn’t I want to try! Higgins was the editor on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one bight a friend found an open note on the poor fellow’s bed, in which be stated that he could no longer enduro life, and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore. He had concluded he wouldn’t. The village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity. I wrote an elaborate account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wood type with a jackknife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in ' is shift, with a lantern, sounding the ' pth of the water with a walking stick I thought it was desperately funny, : :J was densely unconscious that ther ■ was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighbouring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and “see him squirm.” I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the “Burial of Sir John Moore”—and a pretty crude parody it was, too. , Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously— not because they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively. Next I gently touched up the newest stranger—the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy, He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the “loudest” dressed man in the Stale. He was an inveterate womankiller. Every week he wrote lushy “poetry” for the “Journal” about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed, “To Mary in H—l,” meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece f was suddenly riven from head to heel by what T regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humour, and I compressed it into a snappy footnote at the bottom—thus: “We will let this thing pass, just this once: but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune with his friends in h-—1 he must select some other medium than the columns., of this journal.” The piper came out, and I never knew any little thing I<> attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine. For once the “Hannibal Journal” was in demand—a novelty it had not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in With a doublebarrelled shotgun..early 'in the forenoon. When he found that it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage he simply pulled my ears and went away. My uncle was very angry when ho got back. But lie softened when ho looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of 33 new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show’ for it —Cordwood, cabbage, beans and unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years I

The sketch entitled, “Journalism in Tennessee,” contains a lovely picture of the editor of the “Morning Glory and Johnson County Warwhoop.”. Says Mark: When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair, with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine tabic in the room and another afflicted ehair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps ami sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing colh'.r of obsolete pattern and a checkered neckerchief with the ends banging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal He was scowling fearfully, ami I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest. I wrote as follows: SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS. The editors of the semi-weekly “Earthquake”' evidently labour under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhaek Railway. It is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side. On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it. The gentlemen of the “Earthquake” will, of course, take pleasure in making the correction. John W: Blossom, Esq.; the able, editor of the Higginsville “Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom,” arrived in the city yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House. We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs ’‘Morning Howl” lias fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Wcrter is not an established fact, but he will have discoverned his mistake before this reminder reaches him. no doubt. He was doubtless misled by incomplete elections returns. I passed ray manuscript over to the chief editor. He glanced at it, and his face clouded. Up he sprang, exclaiming: “Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such ■ gruel as that? Give me the pen!” I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its .way so .viciously, or plow through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. Pretty soon: “Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.” It now read as follows: The inveterate liars of the. semiweekly “Earthquake” are evidently endeavouring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhaek Railway. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains —or, rather, in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhidifig they so richly deserve. . That ass. Blossom, of the Higginsville “Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom,” is down here again sponging at the Van Buren. We observe that the besotted blackguard of tjie Mud Springs “Morning Howl,” is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error, to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more :gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, "and in all ways better'and holier and happier; and yet this black hearted

scoundrel degrades his great oilier persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity. Later in the day. the editor went out to dinner, leaving Murk in charge, with these directions: “Jones will be here at three cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps —throw him mil of the window. Ferguson will be along about four kill him. That is all for to-day, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police —give the chief inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer ammunition there in the corner —lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In ease of accident, go to Laneeti, the surgeon, downstairs. He advertises—we take it out in trade.” He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next, three hours 1 had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone from me. Gillespie had called, and thrown me out of the window'. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cow-hiding he took the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, 1 had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing Hashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning tny berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and with him a rabble of eharmed and enthusiastic friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brie I’ tornado of murky blasphemy. with a confused and frantic war dance glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was ■silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us. lie said: You'll like this place when you get used to it.” Rather crude hiimour, as a whole, but undeniably funny. ,