Getting from having a cockroach to Mark Twain’s death-defying miracle started with reflecting on weird idioms, “a group of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of the constituent words, as for example ‘It was raining cats and dogs.’”
The Library of Congress’ “Everyday Mysteries” section was asked about the origin of the cats and dogs expression, and replied, “We don’t know. The phrase might have its roots in Norse mythology, medieval superstitions, the obsolete word catadupe (waterfall), or dead animals in the streets of Britain being picked up by storm waters.”
Many of our language’s idioms, like “tickled pink,” “by the skin of your teeth,” and “cut the mustard,” amuse English as a second language students, but they possess their own bizarre sayings. South American Portuguese speakers say “viajando na maionese,” literally meaning “traveling on mayonnaise” and meaning to not have a firm grip on reality, and according to Austen Read-McFarland’s online article “7 Superbly Strange Sayings from Around the World,” “the French ‘avoir le cafard’ — literally ‘to have the cockroach’ — means to be melancholy or have a case of the blues…. It’s in part a pun, actually. ‘Cafard,’ on top of meaning ‘cockroach,’ can also be used to mean ‘hypocrite’ or ‘melancholy.’”
“I did a melt” is a Southern version of the compassionate “my heart melts,” which Webster’s said means “that someone begins to feel love, affection, or sympathy,” and added it’s of unknown origin. The expression describes the opposite of feelings engendered by a “dog in the manger.” Phrases.org.uk states that the “infamous ‘dog in a manger,’ who occupied the manger not because he wanted to eat the hay there but to prevent the other animals from doing so, is generally said to have been the invention of the Greek storyteller Aesop (circa 600 BC).”
In fact, many familiar English language idioms — “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” (from “The Milkmaid and Her Pail”), and “Necessity is the mother of invention” (“The Crow and the Pitcher”) — can be traced back to Aesop, who the Britannica called “the supposed author of a collection of Greek fables, almost certainly a legendary figure.” Nonetheless, Aesop’s been in print almost as long as there’s been printing. The Phrases.org article noted that “Following the production of the Gutenberg Bible in the 1450s, European printers began to look around for other suitable works to print. What better way to educate the common herd than to provide them with the uplifting moral tales of Aesop? The German printer Heinrich Steinhowel set to the task and printed the first German version in 1480. The first English version followed soon after when Caxton adapted the German version into English in 1484.”
That Caxton was William Caxton, the first English language printer and a man who loved words. He made his fortune in the English textile trade and in the process spent a great deal of time in Bruges, Belgium, “the epicenter of Europe’s textile trade,” where he was appointed governor of the Merchant Adventurers’ association by King Edward IV. The Dictionary of National Biography said that “Caxton appears to have found time for travelling and for literary pursuits in these busy years.” For example, he translated into English “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,” a French courtly romance. It was the first of his 24 translations and such a hit that “in order to multiply copies with the greater ease, Caxton (as he tells us in his ‘Prologe’) resolved to put himself to the pains of learning the newly discovered art of printing.” Gutenberg printed his famous Bible around 1455, and in 1473 the first press was set up in Bruges.
Caxton provided the money to publish his “Recuyell” and paid to learn the printing process. “Recuyell” came out in 1474, and in 1476 Caxton returned to England to set up the first printing press in Britain, and a year later he published the first English printed book, “The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers,” a translation of an Arabic “wisdom literature” collection of wise statements by sages. Operating those old presses required great physical exertion, and Caxton did most of that himself in producing over 100 books, including “Aesop’s Fables” in 1484.
Caxton’s “Recuyell” was hot stuff in his day, but to what degree? There’s an intriguing chart attached to “Where Do We Feel Love,” an article from Finland’s Aalto University by Tiina Aulanko-Jokirinne showing where people physically feel different kinds of love. Aalto researchers asked hundreds of their study’s participants to describe how they physically experienced 27 different types of love, including “romantic love, sexual love, parental love, and love for friends, strangers, nature, God, or themselves.” The participants colored in body silhouettes to show where they felt each type of love, how they felt each type physically and mentally, and how pleasurable it felt. The researchers found “a strong correlation between the physical and mental intensity of the emotion and its pleasantness. The more strongly a type of love is felt in the body, the more strongly it’s felt in the mind and the more pleasant it is.” The combined body maps produced a continuum from stronger to lesser reactions, from passionate love lighting up from head to groin, followed by true, romantic, sexual, and mother’s loves. At the other end were love for God, wisdom, moral, and at the bottom, love for strangers.
Mark Twain had strong opinions about love, some of which are reflected in his marginalia in some of his books. Twain resided in Elmira, NY, and Elmira College owns some of his personal books, including “Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets: Biographical Sketches of Women” by Anna Brownell Jameson. Jameson wrote glowingly about the priest Petrarch spotting Laura de Noves in church on April 6, 1327, falling madly in love with her, and leaving the priesthood to pursue her. Unfortunately, Laura was the wife of Count Hugueds de Sade (the infamous Marquis de Sade’s ancestor) and, though they hardly interacted, in Petrarch’s mind she spurned his affection, and he expressed his anguish in a poem, “Fragments of Vernacular Matters.”
Elmira College made digital copies of the pages of Jameson’s book showing Twain’s handwritten comments. Where Jameson wrote “Such was the respect in which Petrarch held her,” Twain penciled, “What could his ‘sacred respect’ have been founded on?” and went on to aver, “This was a foul-hearted beast, This married Laura. A True woman would have ended this sick cub’s drivalings (sic) in short order & sent him about his business.”
Finding books Twain actually owned is a Sisyphean task since, as noted in “Why Would One Man Read Mark Twain’s Whole Library?,” an article from TheGuardian.com by Terena Bell. “As a steamboat captain, Twain … lived on the river, his life and work in constant motion as he authored travelogues, time-travel novels and adventure stories about runaway slaves.” Moreover, he “held other jobs that required travel: prospector, reporter, lecturer. Logistically, he couldn’t keep many books and those he did carry were often lost. A trunk’s worth disappeared on one transatlantic voyage.” His daughter, Susy, said he was “the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh, so absent-minded!” Alan Gribben, a Mark Twain scholar and Auburn University professor emeritus, has tracked down Twain’s personal books for 50 years. He also founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, a nonprofit dedicated to studying Twain’s life, work and times, and particularly Twain’s profound opposition to racism.
As caustic as Twain was about poor Petrarch, his own heart was certainly capable of melting. In “John T. Lewis & Mark Twain: a Friendship,” an essay by Robert Paul Lamb, he described how “in creating the character of Jim in ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ Mark Twain drew upon several real-life people,” but “arguably the most important source for Jim was John T. Lewis of Elmira, New York,” also hometown to Sam Clemens’ in-laws. The family of Twain’s wife’s sister, Susan Langdon Crane, owned Quarry Farm outside Elmira, and their brother Charles Langdon lived in town. John T. Lewis, a free Black man of unusual strength and moral convictions, was born in Maryland in 1835, the same year as Twain, moved to Elmira in 1862 and became Langdon’s coachman. He married and became a tenant farmer for the Cranes until borrowing money from them to buy his own farm.
On Aug. 23, 1877, Twain’s extended family were on the Quarry Farm porch with the Cranes and Charles Langdon watching the latter’s wife and young daughter drive down a long hill in a carriage “drawn by a new, spirited horse” that ran out of control, bounced high going through the gate, and turned out of sight heading for a hairpin turn. Twain and Langdon sprinted futilely after the carriage expecting to find carnage, but instead saw that Lewis, returning from town with a cart load of manure, saw the approaching runaway horse. Twain wrote, “Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the ‘turn,’ thus making a V with the fence — the running horse could not escape that but must enter it. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by & fetched him up standing! How this miracle was ever accomplished at all… is clearly beyond my comprehension.” The Cranes forgave Lewis’ loans, and the combined families threw him a “lavish dinner” in his honor, and gave him numerous gifts, including “a massive, expensive gold watch.”
In short, they all did a melt, and Lewis and Twain became lifelong friends. It was “a match made in heaven.”
