The Opposite of Grief

Mark Twain, novelist, short-story writer, lecturer, and performance artist, celebrated his 70th with a couple hundred of his closest friends and fellow literary luminaries at New York’s famed Delmonico’s restaurant.

“This is my seventieth birthday,” he told his co-celebrants, and, he asked, “I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday?” Turning 70, he said, he was entitled to offer sage advice on the auspicious anniversary.

Mark Twain offered hilarity instead. During years of hectic traveling on the lecture circuit, Twain, outfitted in his trademark white suit, had perfected his comic timing as he crafted the familiar wry and shaggy public persona. And that’s who the well-wishers turned out to hear that night. As an alternative to time-worn platitudes, Twain offered a spoof of the valedictory speech that mixed the profound and the wacky and the truth with the tall tale.

He claimed to recall the occasion of his birth, for example. This, he said, ranked as only the second biggest event in his tiny Missouri hamlet that week. (Halley’s comet had made its closest approach at that moment, upstaging his debut.) And even though seven decades had passed, he did not forget the indignity; Twain remembered having “no clothes, no teeth, and no hair, and had to attend [his] first banquet that way.” Cue uproarious audience laughter.

Subverting the Demands of the Occasion

If an evening such as that one would normally call for a dignified reflection, a weighty sharing of accumulated wisdom, Twain was having none of that. Virtue? Yes, he had led a moral life, but then, he said, he sold the moral to the king of Belgium. (A brutal colonizer in desperate need of a conscience.)

The secret of longevity? He said he had reached his great age by adhering “to a scheme that would kill anybody else.” Exercise? He found exercise “loathsome” and insisted that it “cannot be of any benefit when you are tired.” And, he said, “I was always tired.” Rest? He made it a rule, he said, “to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with.” Health? He admitted to faux-virtuous concessions to physicians’ counsel, having resolved to smoke only one cigar at a time and to drink only when others were drinking. The celebrants, a little lit by that point in the evening, laughed at this mischief, too.

The Skull Grins in at the Banquet

But as Twain’s contemporary, the psychologist William James, remarked about the nearness of mortality, the “skull will grin in at the banquet.” And according to press reports of the evening, Twain’s mood turned pensive toward the end of his brief address, his voice quavering when he characterized in the second person the cohort of seventy-year-olds he’d joined: “For you,” he said, “the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling’s military phrase. You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic. You are emancipated.”

This was freedom, but a melancholy sort of freedom. The party-goers knew that American life expectancy hovered at about 48 years at the turn of the last century, and the psalm about death salience rang in their ears: “The days of our years are three-score and ten.” Following the passing of his daughter and his wife, the demise of his publisher and a lengthening list of friends, Twain’s remaining years were marked by an emotional state that today would likely be recognized as “complicated grief.”

“If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight,” Twain quipped ruefully, “he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too little.”

Play as Antidote

Twain took comfort, however, in caring for a horde of cats. But more actively and effectively, as a lifelong pool shark, he found surcease in his passion for the game. His aversion to exercise aside, Twain had played avidly whenever he could while he traveled, even on threadbare felt. He claimed to have preferred playing pocket billiards on a slanted slate with skewed cues and chipped balls—like the table he recalled enjoying decades before at the “perishing saloon” at the bare bones mining town Jackass Gulch. More surprises that way, and more incentive for betting when play wasn’t literally on the level.

According to his friend and biographer and fellow pool player Albert Bigelow Paine, every Friday night a party of pool players would gather for convivial competitive evenings at Twain’s house in Hartford to tell stories and smoke “until the room was blue.” The evenings were full of glee at clever shots and rage at bad breaks. Clemens “never tired of the game; he could play all night,” Paine wrote. “He would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness and then go on knocking the balls about all alone.”

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A year after his public celebration, his 71st birthday, Twain spent the evening with a few friends playing pool. The game inspired a brave and ruminative poem “Take the Cushion First,” about perseverance and the palliative effects playing pool, woven as with all his work, from the fabric of his life:

When all your days are dark with doubt,

And drying hope is at its worst,

When all life’s balls are scattered wide,

With not a shot in sight, to left or right,

Don’t give it up;

Advance your cue and shut your eyes,

And take the cushion first.

Three years later, steely comforts from defiant recreation like this notwithstanding, mortality was on the great man’s mind. Twain would note wryly—eerily, too, it now seems—that “it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.” And as it happened, Twain died the next year, just as the comet again made its closest approach to earth.