Dearest Rachel –
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it’s the effect of last night’s dream, but it occurs to me that we tend to think that the great men of history – at least those from the same historical time period – knew each other. They may not necessarily have been friends – indeed, the scenario that my mind conjured up involved what I thought to be a particularly cruel prank (then again, I guess some people actually express their friendship with each other by engaging in ‘prank wars,’ so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility) – but they at least know each other well enough to converse, and listen to each other when they meet, even if one instructs the other to observe a certain nonsensical and wasteful ‘custom.’
It’s a conceit not completely without precedent; certainly, there’s the fact that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were good friends, particularly later in life. Granted, at that point, they traveled in the same rarified socioeconomic circles at that point, so it stands to reason that they would come into contact with each other. Not only that, but having both come from fairly humble beginnings to reach those levels of wealth and prestige, they would have been drawn to each other as a fellow disrupter of the status quo that most of those with that kind of money and status (which were primarily generational) would have clung tightly to. It might be putting things a little harshly, but one high society outcast might be expected to seek out another, and forging a bond that would be remarked upon throughout history.
But having said that, any comparison of two of the greatest inventors from the American heartland to a writer who moved west and a composer on the other side of the world who all but swindled a king seems ridiculous, even in these few moments after waking up that I’m still currently in (yes, I can put together more than a few words when I feel the need to get them down in pixels before I forget them). I get that dreams aren’t supposed to make sense by their very nature, but this one was particularly strange; which of course, is why I’m relating it to you in the first place.
Then again, there was at least a certain nodding familiarity involved between them, at least from one to the other. Even in the days before Edison and his company were putting out recordings of music on wax cylinders (let alone the vinyl platters that would be the industry standard for half a century), it would seem that Mark Twain had heard the music of Richard Wagner, proclaiming it “better than it sounds.” Whether that’s a case of damning with faint praise or praising with faint damns, I leave to you and whoever might be reading over your shoulder, honey. I can’t say whether Wagner was aware of Twain or his opinion of him; there’s no reason why Europeans would be craving anything cultural or artistic that bumpkin Americans would produce back then any more than they do today.
But for whatever reason, my dream had it such that these two artistic titans of the Gilded Age (although I guess that term technically only applies to America during the post-Civil War boom) knew each other well enough to go drinking and gambling together when they would meet up, which admittedly was the rare enough occasion, as they came from opposite ends of the world. Then again, Twain eventually became quite the traveler, and wrote more than a few stories about his own personal adventures, so maybe that isn’t so far out of the realm of possibility as all that.
Still, there’s point where a dream veers from vaguely possible to absurd, and we’re about to get there. Wagner’s world, of course, was that of what we now think of as Germany and Austria, lands of folklore and legends that he used in his works. But while he may have been aware of them, I don’t believe he bothered to use the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in his work, preferring the grander sweep of the ancient Norse deities and demigods (certainly, a cataclysmic event such as Ragnarök would be more, well, operatic, in its consequentiality as opposed to a couple of kids lost in a forest, for instance). Somehow, my mind seized on this, and had the fairy tales be somewhat real in my dreamscape, which allowed Twain to play a joke on Wagner.
During a game of chance (it might have been cards, but I wouldn’t… erm… bet on it), Twain was able to collect the pot, which included several golden eggs; yes, from that famous goose that, in the stories, was slain to collect them all at once (which, of course was not how eggs work). He inspected each of them individually, and threw every other one over his shoulder, where they broke with a satisfying splat, much to Wagner’s consternation and alarm.
“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know what those are, and how much they’re worth?” the composer cried. To which Twain looked over his shoulder at the broken eggs, and shrugged nonchalantly.
“What, those? They’re as common as… well, eggs, back home in the Yukon,” the humorist smiled (not that he’d ever been there himself either, but like Ben Franklin a century before, he knew how to represent himself as the quintessential American, rather than point out differences between one region of his homeland and another). “It’s customary back there to discard at least every other one when you win them. You never know when someone’s going to slip a real egg in the pot rather than a gold one.” He gestured behind him to indicate that someone had, indeed, bet a couple of real eggs, based on the results of their contact with the floor.
Somehow, this cavalier attitude toward gold and wealth – not to mention, Twain’s canny suspicion of his fellow gamblers and the things they anted up – impressed Wagner, and he resolved to be as shrewd with his winnings at his next opportunity. He didn’t have to wait long, as it happened, as the next round resulted in his emerging victorious and collecting the pot, which once again, contained several golden eggs. However, he couldn’t determine which of them was suspect; they all had about the same heft and even density in his hands. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to be seen as either stingy or a naïf, so he threw several of them over his shoulder, in the same manner as his ‘friend’ had, whereupon they bounced against the wall and rolled back to the table, at which point Twain pounced on them as they came within reach.
With a gentlemanly flourish, he handed Wagner two of the three golden eggs he had discarded, while pocketing the third as a ‘finder’s fee’ in his waistcoat. It was at this point that I could see into his pocket as he stored it that he’d brought some actual eggs to the table, and those were what he’d thrown over his shoulder to fool his friend into doing likewise. I’m not sure if Twain acknowledged that fact, or explained his little bit of sleight of hand – most magicians don’t, so why would an amateur like Twain do so, when he’d pulled something over on his friend like this? Nor am I sure of whether this type of stunt would sour their friendship more, or if revealing it (while keeping the one egg) would be the worse option. In any event, I didn’t see the aftermath, as things faded out from there, as dreams are wont to do.
Not sure what you’d think of this story, honey, but I present it to you as I remember it (with a few touches to make it a little more coherent – it’s all coming from the same brain, in any event), and you can take it for whatever you think it’s worth.
Letters to Rachel 