Mark Twain's "Skeleton Novelette"
An introduction to Mark Twain's "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage"—a work written for these pages 125 years ago and published here for the first time
When he was forty, and the nation was exactly a century old, Mark Twain concocted a project in conjunction with The Atlantic Monthly which came to nothing until now. There's a story in that.
"Very often, of course," Twain wrote in "How to Tell a Story," "the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it."
Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.
Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at.
Twain, far more than Ward, was a master of such deadpan trickery. Once, at a gala banquet, Twain delivered a toast to Ulysses S. Grant that seemed to be a long, drawn-out insult. He paused "for a sort of shuddering silence" (as he wrote exultantly to his wife, Livy), and then he delivered the snapper. Grant cracked up. "The audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity," Twain wrote Livy. "The house came down with a crash."
Another time he came onstage and just stood there, expressionless, as if he weren't even aware that he was supposed to be the speaker, and realized that he could hold people silent on the edges of their seats for about as long as he wanted to without uttering a word. "An audience captured in that way," he wrote home, "belongs to the speaker, body and soul."
