{"id":147129,"date":"2020-08-25T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T16:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147129"},"modified":"2020-08-25T13:09:55","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T17:09:55","slug":"mark-twains-mind-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/25\/mark-twains-mind-waves\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Twain\u2019s Mind Waves"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

In February, in our family iMessage group, my brother asked our mother to indulge his craving for egg salad sandwiches. \u201cThat is so weird,\u201d I replied. \u201cI dreamt of mom\u2019s egg salad two days ago<\/em>.\u201d It had been years since I had eaten it, but chewing in my dream, I realized the crunch of the celery that my mother added was the secret. \u201cI had the same epiphany!!!\u201d Dustin texted back. \u201cThe celery!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on: Maybe this was the chemo he was doing, but Chinese and BBQ from spots we liked out of state were also appealing. He beat\u2014by half a second\u2014a message I was in the midst of sending about how I longed for food from those exact places. We exclaimed at the chances. Dustin joked that my two-month-old had \u201cgiven us magical powers,\u201d or that our family dog was controlling our minds. \u201cTHE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When my brother passed away at twenty-nine from complications of leukemia some weeks later, I livestreamed his funeral in Florida from under lockdown in France. The distance between us was imponderable, as great as it could ever be. We\u2019d both<\/em> wanted the egg salad. That the connection between us would be cut did not follow. Grief breaks your heart; also, it breaks your brain. While we keep the people we love in our hearts, it began to seem that Dustin was in my head more than anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote,\u00a0 that a mind \u201cstill inhabiting the flesh\u201d could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain\u2019s red hair went gray), which he recollected as \u201cthe oddest thing that ever happened to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mail had just come at Twain\u2019s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. \u201cNow I will do a miracle,\u201d he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn\u2019t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been \u201cin close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.\u201d Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: \u201cDear Dan\u2014Wonders never will cease.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan De Quille was the alias of William Wright. In 1862, both men had started as staffers at the Territorial Enterprise<\/em>\u00a0in Virginia City, Nevada, and fast became a double-barreled force: the best writers at the hottest paper during the Silver Rush. De Quille was six years older than Samuel Clemens, who showed up, dusty, at twenty-six, as \u201cJosh,\u201d one of dozens of pseudonyms he tried on before becoming Twain.<\/p>\n

The territory was given to gunplay, dustups, fire, pranks, and \u201chigh hope,\u201d as Twain wrote in Roughing It<\/a><\/em>, and its print culture was unruly, too. \u201cGet your facts first, and \u2026 then you can distort \u2019em as much as you please\u201d was his twenty-four-year-old editor in chief\u2019s guidance. Twain, De Quille said, was averse to fact-heavy \u201c\u2018cast-iron\u2019 items,\u201d but he was ace among the journalists there who played hell with objectivity and spun elaborate \u201csells,\u201d from lampoons to hoaxes. (De Quille favored science hoaxes.) The boomtown\u2019s denizens, Twain biographer<\/a> Gary Scharnhorst points out, had an appetite for Harper\u2019s<\/em>, The Atlantic<\/em>, Dickens, and Shakespeare, as well as for the infotainment. It was said the Enterprise<\/em>\u2019s owners carried home thousand-dollar daily profits in water buckets.<\/p>\n

De Quille and Twain \u201coften cruised in company.\u201d They shared a desk. They shared lodging\u2014a double bed. \u201cMark and I agreed well as room-mates,\u201d De Quille recalled. \u201cBoth wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and when one got hungry and got up to go down town for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out.\u201d (Scharnhorst told me the theory the two were lovers has been \u201croundly scorned\u201d by scholars, especially by Larry Berkove, the late authority on these journalist-humorists.) They enrolled in fencing club. \u201cIt is said to be highly amusing to witness a set-to between these two \u2018roosters,\u2019 they sometimes get so terribly in earnest,\u201d reported the Gold Hill Daily News<\/em>, which often trafficked in their antics. \u201cDan De Quille and Mark Twain are to be married shortly,\u201d the paper kidded in April 1864. However, the next month, Twain hotfooted it to San Francisco. The bromance had lasted less than two years. \u201cNevertheless, their association was more intense and long-lasting than has been appreciated, for their sharing of ideas and stories must have been so extensive as to constitute a common pool,\u201d Berkove reflected. He was unsurprised \u201cthat minds which were once so familiar and in tune with each other should continue to produce, even after the interval of many years, thoughts and compositions which bear the impress of the former partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ten years later, in October 1874, the motherlode was unearthed in Virginia City. The vein, which De Quille called the Big Bonanza, was the richest silver strike in American history and would pay out north of a billion dollars in bullion. De Quille was then the Enterprise<\/em>\u2019s mining expert (\u201cwith a love for the lode\u201d) and a group of the mining magnates wished him to chronicle their Silverado. De Quille, a dipsomaniac who labored crazy hours for moderate moola, had other manuscripts on the stove, but he resolved to ask his former friend, the now-famous Twain, for advice on how to \u201cturn clown.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, eureka! As De Quille was writing to him, Twain was reckoning that \u201cthe market was ready\u201d for \u201cThe Story of the Comstock Lode, with all the strange & romantic fortunes & incidents connected with it,\u201d and the person to pull off such a history, obviously, was \u201cdandy quill.\u201d Twain outlined the book he envisioned, hooked De Quille up with his publisher, and welcomed him to Hartford to \u201cgrind literature all day long in the same room,\u201d blued by cigar smoke.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Big Bonanza<\/em> (1876) is still the definitive, if inchoate, history of Nevada\u2019s Comstock Lode and the frontier\u2019s bonanza camps.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1878, Twain wrote about mental telegraphy in A Tramp Abroad<\/em>. And before going to press, he blotted all of it out. \u201cI feared the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside,\u201d he said, \u201cwhereas I was in earnest.\u201d About a decade later: \u201cI tried to creep in under shelter of an authority grave enough to protect the article from ridicule\u2014the North American Review.\u201d The chief, Lorettus Metcalf, insisted on Twain\u2019s byline, but Twain understood that his forked tongue had saddled him with a believability problem, and people would not take him seriously, dammit. \u201cSo I pigeonholed the Ms., because I could not get it published anonymously.\u201d Finally, for Harper\u2019s<\/em>, sixteen years after he received De Quille\u2019s letter, in December 1891, Twain trotted out his surety that egg salad incidents like ours were not accidents.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the puzzling part of it,\u201d he wrote in \u201cMental telegraphy. A manuscript with a history.\u201d \u201cWe are always talking about letters \u2018crossing\u2019 each other, for that is one of the very commonest accidents of this life. We call it \u2018accident,\u2019 but perhaps we misname it.\u201d Elsewhere, Twain had proposed the \u201crapport between two minds\u201d operated on \u201ca finer and subtler form of electricity,\u201d which inventors must harness for a thought-sending device, called the \u201cphrenophone.\u201d We\u2019d be able to say, \u201c\u2018Connect me with the brain of the chief of police at Peking.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years later, Twain returned to the subject of mental telegraphy in Harper\u2019s<\/em> with a fresh roll of examples. They were intricate. One day, for instance, he and his friend Joseph Twichell were going to visit Twichell\u2019s daughter\u2014to whom Twain was like an uncle\u2014at her boarding school. As they journeyed, Twain told Twitchell of an encounter a while back: He was in Milan, when a soldier on leave approached him. Lieutenant H. explained that they\u2019d met when he was a cadet and Twain and Twitchell had come to West Point. The soldier mentioned that he\u2019d recently misplaced his letter of credit, and that an American couple with daughters\u2014strangers\u2014had lent him the money to settle his hotel bill. He was headed to repay them, and Twain went along. \u201cI was introduced to the parents and the young ladies; then we separated, and I never saw him or them any m\u2014.\u201d Twain was interrupted as the trolley arrived at their stop. At Miss Porter\u2019s School, lasses streamed by. A girl came up and shook Twichell\u2019s hand\u2014she was, she explained, a friend of his daughter. Then she turned to Twain: \u201cAnd I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens. You don\u2019t remember me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a half ago by Lieutenant H.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The end page in a copy of The Big Bonanza<\/em>. Its original owner sent the book to Twain with the question, \u201cIs there any truth in the newspaper story that you planned this book for the author before you knew he had written it?\u201d Twain returned the book with an answer. \u201cYes, it is true.\u201d Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t exactly know what to do with Twain\u2019s psychic claims,\u201d Scharnhorst responded, when I asked him if Twain\u2019s notion of mental telegraphy was another leg-pull, the same brand of jest he undertook in the West. \u201cI don\u2019t think it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s basically coincidence,\u201d Kevin Mac Donnell, a rare book dealer and Mark Twain scholar who owns the largest private collection of Twain material, including nine thousand first editions, letters, and manuscripts, told me by phone. \u201cTwain dispatched fifty thousand letters in his lifetime, easily, and was a social butterfly, ever traveling. Of course his letters crossed and he ran into people in the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the Bonanza<\/em> business as Twain narrated it does not prove out. A copy of the letter Twain sent in reply to De Quille\u2019s letter survives. His dates are off. He tells De Quille his wife, Livy, was there when the mail came; in the magazine piece, Twain\u2019s witness is another relative. Those are peccadillos. Less so the pretense that he \u201chad not seen and had hardly thought of [De Quille] for eleven years\u201d and did not even know if De Quille was alive. \u201cThat\u2019s fudged,\u201d said Mac Donnell. \u201cHe knew how to create buzz; how to quicken plot.\u201d In March 1869, Twain wrote to De Quille that he intended to marry. Afterward, Twain sent a wedding announcement personalized with ancient in-jokes: \u201cOld Dan, my abused roommate\u2014{but who stole old Mrs. Fitch\u2019s pies, nevertheless\u2014& Daggett\u2019s wood.}\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, ben trovato exaggeration does not contradict sincerity. \u201cAs a mental exercise, as a literary device,\u201d Mac Donnell said, \u201cyou can see how mental telegraphy works for Twain and connects to his overall open-mindedness.\u201d Mac Donnell referred to Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc<\/em>, Twain\u2019s last novel. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t question her visions,\u201d Mac Donnell said.<\/p>\n

In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research formed in London to investigate paranormal human experiences \u201cwithout prejudice or prepossession.\u201d The society did, however, want to prove thought transference, and that year one of its members coined the term \u201ctelepathy.\u201d When Twain joined two years later, he told SPR\u2019s cofounder that, ever since Bonanza<\/em>, he had known the t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eates were real. When the notion to contact someone hit him, Twain confessed to feeling \u201clike a mere amanuensis.\u201d He assumed the other person had just cabled him. For the rest of his life, Twain continued to note the freakiness of telepathy.<\/p>\n

Three years before his heart attack, in 1907, he wrote that \u201cinventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books\u201d could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, \u201cI often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else\u2019s.\u201d The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he\u2019d composed seventeen years earlier\u2014\u201chilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,\u201d and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. Twain concluded that \u201cMr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Twain was serious, and not way off. He anticipated brain\u2013computer interface, for one thing. Last fall, the system dubbed BrainNet<\/a>\u2014a kind of phrenophone\u2014allowed three people in different rooms to play a game of Tetris together with their minds. \u201cI\u2019m telling you about something so sci-fi,\u201d Chantel Prat<\/a>, one of the neuroscientists who developed BrainNet, said on a call. BrainNet uses a machine to decode brain activity from a sender brain, an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to record that activity, and computer software to translate it for a receiver brain. \u201cIt\u2019s very much like a microphone,\u201d Prat explained. \u201cThis electrode sits on the scalp and picks up the electrical activity that\u2019s happening inside the head. The signal extends outside the head. We can\u2014we do\u2014record outside the head what\u2019s happening on the inside of it.\u201d I asked how far brainwaves can travel: Were we talking centimeters? Inches, feet\u2014football fields? Prat could not say. But it was not across mountains, deserts, or oceans.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of our thoughts transmit at 40-200 hertz. They can\u2019t go very far,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the brain is like a radio. Brainwaves come in different frequencies; some happen at 2-7 hertz, and those lower frequencies have a farther range.\u201d Researchers studying neurosemantics at Carnegie Mellon are able to decode words and even sentences in our brainwaves, but Prat wanted to emphasize that we can decode much more than we can encode. \u201cWhen we put info in the brain,\u201d she said, \u201cit\u2019s a lot like a sledgehammer coming down: We cannot put an idea in the brain. We can make somebody\u2019s finger twitch.\u201d She appreciated Mark Twain\u2019s cast of mind, though.<\/p>\n

In a socially distanced world, disconnected from Dustin, I\u2019m left remembering his capacious imagination for human contact. People get into our heads. And when we know they are out there, thinking of us, us thinking of them, that signal is so clear. What Twain told De Quille is true: \u201chuman sympathies can stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to <\/em>The New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion\u00a0and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMark Twain\u2019s Mind Waves by Chantel Tattoli<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 25, 2020 \u2013 Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/25\/mark-twains-mind-waves\/\" \/>\n<meta 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