Some of those later postings reminded me of a few things.

Twain's famous letter to the Hartford gas company is similar to the letter
to Howells, in jest. Twain admired creative cursing, and once admonished
Livy when she repeated some of his cursing back to him in an effort to show
him how bad it was to curse. All she got for her trouble was a critique of
her lack of proper inflection by a husband who could not stop laughing. It
might be productive to get the Twain World CD and do some word searches of
"ass" "damn" etc and see what turns up and in what context. Twain's
description of guys falling on their asses (donkeys) in Innocents Abroad is
a gem. But when all is said and done I suspect the cursing reflected in his
writings is just a pale reflection of his personal "oral tradition." I have
two books that he annotated for use in his lectures and recitations, and in
one of them he has changed the printed phrase in "Journalism in Tennessee"
that reads something like "braying insect" to "braying jack-ass" for his
reading. Of course, insects don't bray, so it is clear that he was not
merely changing the text, but actually restoring his original text that had
been cleansed for publication --and he was perfectly happy to say "jack-ass"
in a public reading.

The recordings that Whitmore cited in the 1920s were probably the now lost
wax cylinders dictated for American Claimant (at least the number is about
right). Twain walked in on opera star Nellie Melba while she was recording,
stood in the door and made some jokey apology, and then stepped out. That
one seems to be lost, as well as one of a speech he gave, plus the Edison
recordings (the Edison film survives, of course). It is not clear which
recording of his voice survived in the collection destroyed in WW2. The
Gillette recording exists in the Yale Historical Sound Collection, and I
think I've heard it played for tourists at either the Boyhood Home in
Hannibal or the MTM in Hartford. I have an ancient cassette copy of the
Gillette recording but no way to reproduce it.

Kevin Mac Donnell
Austin TX