vignette of Mr. Clemens on matches

One of the few good excerpts found in the September 2006 issue of Harper's. This is a piece by an anonymous (thus far) individual who interviewed Twain between 1871 and 1910.

The first word I heard from his lips was an amusing anathema upon the recalcitrant match, which, despite all he could do to the contrary, obstinately refused to light his pipe. The way he condemned that match, the pathetic solemnity of his protest against the ignominy of being 'insulted by a mere inanimate thing' lingers with me to this day.

His particular drone, being a difficult matter to reproduce with the ordinary, copper-faced type commonly in use among the high class of American newspapers, must be left for the imagination of the reader to supply.

One unaccustomed to Americans would conclude that Mr. Clemens is a phenomenally lazy man, one word following the other as though each was being mentally turned over, its full worth in the sentence weighed.

With a slow and distinct enunciation, tinged with a slight American accent, which gives piquancy to his delivery, he pours forth a flood of most graphic word painting.

A woman could do up her hair twice while he pronounced the word Mississippi. He lingers over it, plays with it, handles it as a young mother does her first baby.

He talks slowly and extracts each of his vowels with a corkscrew twist that would make even the announcement of a funeral sound like a joke.

A pause. A longer pause than usual. An abominably protracted pause. A pause of hovering on the abyss of irretrievable silence.

Note: this was pulled from Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, (U of Alabama Press, 2006), appearing on p. 16 of Harper's, a magazine that has taken a serious dive since Twain stopped publishing in it.