Plymouth Rock and Other Speeches
by Mark Twain
edited by Charles Neider
Cooper Square Press

In a lecture given to the Aldine Association Club in New York in 1905, Mark Twain described the illustrations for a particular edition of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" as:

...one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities, of our poor human race, and also at the professions and the insolence of priestcraft and kingcraft — those creatures that make slaves of themselves and have not the manliness to shake it off.

The same words could be neatly applied to his own incredible literary output.

In "Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims, and Other Speeches," readers see a great deal of what made Mark Twain one of the most beloved, respected and well-read literary personages of the late 19th and early 20th century.

The occasionally musty, fusty and dull image of Twain that is ritually inflicted upon schoolchildren who are dredged through a mandatory reading of "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn" is nowhere to be seen in the pages of this lively collection. Twain shines as a man incredibly well-informed about the events of his day, speaking out against imperialism, dining with literary greats, founding his own publishing house and traveling the world.

Each of the collection's 82 speeches is well-framed by clear, crisp explanatory text that sets the scene, and helps render each event as a discrete facet of Twain's personal life or career.

Twain, a nome de plume for author Samuel Clemens, was more than just an acclaimed essayist, short story writer and author — he was a lecturer famed for his deft touch and savage wit, able to reduce audiences to peals of laughter while, as The Northern Whig describes, "never moving the muscles of his face, speaking in a tone which is almost melancholy, with what the French call 'tears in his voice.'"

Twain's literary skill and light touch make it doubly odd that the collection's emotional peak is "Whittier's Birthday," a disastrous speech given in the company of three of New England's literary greats: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The speech, meant to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Atlantic Monthly and the 70th birthday of John Greenleaf Whittier, was a cleverly crafted humorous send-up of the evening's three most prominent guests. It was met by stony faced silence and resulted in the social collapse of the entire event. And while the speech's implosion clearly caused Twain a great deal of personal anguish, his latter-day musings on the disaster render him approachably human in a way that is both entertaining, and incredibly touching.

Aside from helping build a much more clear and nuanced picture of Twain as a man, his speeches contain a great deal of merit unto themselves — it's not for nothing that Twain is considered the father of modern humor. And though a great deal of his lecturing was essentially forced upon him by the necessity of battling back debt incurred by his failed publishing venture, he managed to make each of the collected speeches serve up some unique and potent combination of sentiment, humor and trenchant observations. In one particularly amusing speech, Twain addressed the railroads, the irresponsible mega-corporations of his day:

But, thank Heaven, the railway companies are generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing without compulsion. I know of an instance which greatly touched me at the time. After an accident the company sent home the remains of a dear distant old relative of mine in a basket, with the remark, "Please state what figure you hold him at, and return the basket."

Now there couldn't be anything friendlier than that.

And in a speech entitled "Woman," he said:

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society, and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart she has few equals and no superiors. As a cousin she is convenient. As a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious. As a wet nurse she has no equal among men.

What, sir, would the people of the Earth be without women? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce. Then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy, ourselves — if we get a chance.

Not entirely PC, but probably pretty okay in 1868 — and more than offset by a pro-suffrage speech called "Women's Rights" in which he says a number of more thoughtful and less quotable things that put him at the forefront of progressive thinkers of his age.

As contemporary satirist Michael Moore has arguably demonstrated, well-informed humor can be a powerful force for social progress. The well from which Moore draws his water was dug by Mark Twain, and this collection of speeches admirably displays the tools with which it was excavated.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)