 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE.
The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops
thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted
him as a Radical:—“While he was writing the first
word, the middle, dotting his i's, crossing his t's,
and punching his period, he knew he was concocting
a sentence that was saturated with infamy and
reeking with falsehood.”
—Exchange.
I WAS told by the physician that a
Southern climate would improve my
health, and so I went down to Tennessee,
and got a berth on the Morning Glory
and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate
editor. 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
table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under
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 collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered
neckerchief with the ends hanging 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, and 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 labor under a misapprehension with
regard to the Ballyhack railroad. 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 has fallen into the error
of supposing that the election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have discovered
his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was doubtless misled by incomplete
election returns.
“It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring to contract with some New York
gentlemen to pave its well-nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The Daily Hurrah
urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success.”
I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or
destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the
pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something
was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said—
“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 plough through
another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of
his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry
of my ear.
“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano—he was due
yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired. Smith
dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith's aim, who was just taking a
second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just as he
finished them a hand-grenade came down the stove pipe, and the explosion shivered
the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except
that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
“Well, no matter—don't want it this kind of weather. I know the man that did
it. I'll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its
mother wouldn't have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:—
“SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS.
“The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring 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 Ballyhack railroad. The
idea that Buzzardville was to be left oft 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 cowhiding 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 the Mud Spring 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 office persistently
to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.
“Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poorhouse more. The idea
of a pavement in a one horse town composed of two gin mills, a blacksmith's shop, and that mustardplaster
braying about this business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.”
“Now that is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism
gives me the fan-tods.”
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and
gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of range—I began to
feel in the way.
The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely. I've been expecting him for two
days. He will be up, now, right away.”
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with a
dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this mangy
sheet?”
“You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone. I
believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Col. Blatherskite Tecumseh?”
“Right, sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure we
will begin.”
“I have an article on the `Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual
Development in America' to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a
lock of his hair, and the Colonel's bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my
thigh. The Colonel's left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both
missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third
fire both gentleman were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I then
said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and
I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me
to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.
They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded, and I
fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again with animation,
and every shot took effect—but it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to
my share. The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine
humor, that he would have to say good morning now, as he had business up town.
He then inquired the way to the undertaker's and left.
The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and shall
have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and attend to
the customers.”
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too bewildered
by the fusilade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say.
He continued, “Jones will be here at 3—cowhide him. Gillespie will call
earlier, perhaps—throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about 4—
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 case of accident, go to Lancet,
the surgeon, down-stairs. He advertises—we take it out in trade.”
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I 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 cowhiding he took the job off my hands.
In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I 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 flashes of steel,
I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and
with him a rabble of charmed 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 brief 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.
He said, “You'll like this place when you get used to it.”
I said, “I'll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write to suit
you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language
I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of
that yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no doubt, but,
then I do not like to attract so much attention as it calls forth. I can't write with
comfort when I am interrupted so much as I have been to-day. I like this berth
well enough, but I don't like to be left here to wait on the customers. The
experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertaining too, after a fashion, but they
are not judiciously distributed. A gentleman shoots at you through the window
and cripples me; a bomb-shell comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification
and sends the stove-door down my throat; a friend drops in to swap compliments
with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my skin won't hold my principles;
you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of
scalp with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes
all the blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare
the rest of me to death with their tomahawks. Take it altogether, I never had
such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day. No; I like you, and I like
your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am
not used to it. The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too
lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into
whose cold sentences your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennessean
journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors
will come—and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for breakfast. I
shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present at these festivities. I came
South for my health, I will go back on the same errand, and suddenly. Tennesseean
journalism is too stirring for me.”
After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.
| Mark Twain's sketches, new and old | |