Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [74]
Guest after guest rose in praise of the Volcanoes. Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes were giants who knew themselves to be giants, and it was an era completely unembarrassed by lavish flattery; soon the accumulated pomposity threatened to inflate the Brunswick Hotel and float it high over Boston. Then it was Twain’s turn. He ascended to the podium, paused, and launched into a tall tale of his days in the Nevada country, when he’d come upon a miner recently besieged by three impostors pretending to be Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes. “Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” Twain recalled the miner reporting. “Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon. He weighed as much as three hundred and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize fighter. . . . They had been drinking, I could see that.” Twain thought it was clear enough that the three were impostors; his plan was for the Twain of the story to slam them as pitiful impersonators of the “gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage.” But he took too long to reach that point—and by the time he had, the literary fellowship gathered at the Brunswick Hotel was severely unamused.
“I didn’t know enough to give it up and sit down,” Twain recalled almost thirty years later. “I was too new to public speaking.” But the truth is that he’d been lecturing for more than a decade and was a flabbergastingly daring speaker. He once told a packed house the same dull anecdote six times in a row, until they saw the “delicate satire” and erupted. Another time he walked onstage and stood, smoking, saying nothing, for over ten minutes, until finally the room exploded with laughter and applause. In public-speaking terms, that’s Super Bowl MVP stuff. The man knew how to work a crowd, how to read it, how to make uncomfortable silences work for him—to draw out pauses until they were primed to hold whatever he wanted to fill them with.
But at the Whittier dinner his instincts failed him. He looked out over the silent ruins of a fine Victorian banquet, the white table-cloths now stained and rumpled, covered with crumbs and coffee cups. The guests wore black vests; they sat in long, quiet rows. Someone toyed with a pastry fork; someone drained a last minuscule drop of claret. After a “frightful, . . . awful, . . . desolating silence,” the next speaker had to get up. The poor hopeful is now remembered only as Bishop—the author of a recent well-received novel, who (in Twain’s telling at least) was about to walk into the public-speaking equivalent of a chain saw:
Bishop was away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest, consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion and for the first time in his life speak in public. . . .
I had spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to go on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done—but Bishop had had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities—facing those other people, those strangers, facing human beings for the first time in his life, with a speech to utter. . . . He didn’t last long. It was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.
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