Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1906 — MARK TWAIN’S HARD FATE. [ARTICLE]

MARK TWAIN’S HARD FATE.

Painful Stories Reflecting on Hie Personal Pulchritude Current. The first critid that ever had occaslon to describe my personal appearancelittered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found who could look a’t me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy that lie. That lie began its course on the Pacific coast in 1864 and it likened me in personal appearance to Petroleum V. Nasby, who had been out there lecturing. For twenty-five years afterward no critic could furnish a description of me without fetching In Nasby to help out my portrait I knew Nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life I have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart. I was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it And it had long been a distress to my family—lncluding Susy—that the critics should go on making this wearisome mistake year after year when there was no foundation for it. Even when a critic wanted to be particularly friendly and complimentary to me he didn’t dare to go beyond my clothes. He never ventured beyond that old safe frontier. When he had finished with my clothes he had said all the kind things, the pleasant things, the complimentary things he could risk. Then he dropped back on Nnsby. —Mark Twain in North American Review.