Notice the pair

Mark Twain

When he began writing for a newspaper in Nevada as a young man, Samuel Clemens chose "Mark Twain" as a pseudonym. The name stuck, and he continued to write as Mark Twain for the rest of his long and celebrated literary career. The usual explanation for this choice of names is that it comes from his brief career on a Mississippi riverboat, "mark twain" being a term used to mean two fathoms, or a safe depth of 12 feet.

Yet it it interesting to examine his life and work in terms of the literal meaning of that chosen name. The phrase "mark twain" would mean something like "note the two" or "notice the pair." Just the fact that the man had two names, Samuel Clemens the private citizens and Mark Twain the famous writer, gives significance to the choice.

Twain may be America's most celebrated humorist. The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is awarded each year to some deserving humorist, few of whom have reputations for wit that will survive anywhere near as long as Twain's. Yet, especially toward the end of his life because of a string of personal losses, he was a bitter, depressed man. He has been described as a nihilist. Most of his later literary output was not printed until after his death because it was so unlike the books he was famous for.

The man was celebrated in his own time for his literary success, yet in his business dealing he was an abject failure. He loved new technology and invested heavily in products, such as an early type-setting machine, that he thought would make him so wealthy he could retire from writing. Instead he lost everything and was forced to continue writing and then go on long lecture tours to make enough money to pay his debts.

Just as he was a man with two sides to his personality, character and reputation, so the characters in his stories so often came in pairs: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim, the prince and the pauper, the duke and the king (or the duke and dauphin). Twain seemed fascinated by the idea of Siamese twins, and in one of his best novels, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he writes of two babies, one white and the other a light-skinned slave, who are switched soon after birth. Twain once wrote a sketch about an imagined twin brother.

And so it goes. When reading Twain, or reading about him, notice the pair.