Mark Twain and the Art of Memory

ANY have commented on the importance of in the LYJL materials, themes, and composition of Mark Twain's works.' And not only as a fiction writer but also as a riverboat pilot and as a lecturer, Mark Twain's livelihood, and at times even his life, depended on his ability to remember bends and obstacles in the river or words and ideas to be delivered from the lecture platform. Much of Old Times on the Mississippi supports the thesis, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. I think a pilot's is about the most wonderful thing in the world.2 And yet throughout his life Clemens had a notoriously poor memory. Even as a cub pilot he continually worried how with his dull memory he would be able to retain the shape of the river; nor was this merely a fictional pose, for Clemens' absent-mindedness was a family joke. At age fourteen Susy introduces her father into her biography of him as . the loveliest man I ever saw, and ever so absentminded,3 and Paine notes that even as a young man he could

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