GLR January-February 2025

tiations and other gatherings where Greek phallic comedy sur vives has ever been in doubt as to the sort of show the King pro vided,” one writer asserted with confidence. (However, Twain specifies that the king was not strutting around the stage wav ing his cock, but had “come a-prancing out on all fours, naked.”) It was not until 1968 that a more likely scenario was sug gested by Twain scholar Wallace Graves. He related a story he heard in the early 1930s about a scam that had supposedly taken place some years earlier in Sweden, a story that revealed a fa miliarity with the original meaning of the slang expression. There, “two destitute traveling actors” had presented an im promptu performance before an all-male audience. One man collected money while the audience filed in, then came around and appeared before the curtain announcing that a great dramatic play called “The Burning Shame” was about to be shown. The curtain was then raised, and his partner, naked, came out on his hands and knees. The other said: “And now, gentlemen, you are about to see The Tragedy of the Burn ing Shame.” He inserted a candle in the naked man’s posterior, and lit it. When nothing further happened, the audience shouted for something more; the man said the performance was over; the viewers shouted: “You mean, that’s all?” “Yes,” the man said, “have you ever seen a better example of a ‘Burning Shame’?” Then the two dashed out of town, the audience in hot pursuit. The Swedish story as Graves relayed it parallels Twain’s trun cated and censored “Royal Nonesuch” a bit too neatly; one sus pects that someone in the 1930s had read Huckleberry Finn . Despite Graves’ widely known theory that “The Burning Shame” involved sticking a lighted candle up a man’s rear end, subsequent writers were reluctant to concede that America’s fa vorite humorist might have been making an anal allusion. One suggested that “[t]he ‘tragedy’ of the ‘burning shame’ and the ‘royal nonesuch’ seem then to form a configuration that in volves sexual incapacity and possibly some sort of phallic sub stitute ... [and] very likely involved a male’s inability to sustain an erection,” the limp penis being hidden by “some kind of ex aggerated phallus.” Another declared: “This ‘outfit’ is not a lighted candle but a gargantuan, artificial phallus attached to the king at its appropriate place.” The appropriate place for a penis substitute being, of course, in front. Central to the story itself—and to the rejection of the very idea of a lighted candle as one of the stage props—is the as sumption that there is nothing more degrading than a naked man on his hands and knees with something hard and cylindri cal inserted into his posterior. Bottom shaming is integral to

the story. No one is quite sure why Twain switched the title to “The Royal Nonesuch” at the last moment and cut short his de scription of the king’s performance, but he was probably con cerned about offending his readership with something that pushed impropriety a bit too far. He knew that he was already on thin ice with the theme of a white boy helping a black man escape from slavery. Twain’s personal finances at the time were shaky, and he needed to sell as many copies of the novel as pos sible, so he couldn’t afford to offend too many readers. He even worried that the drawing of Huck Finn that the publisher had chosen for the cover might be problematic, complaining that “the boy’s mouth is a trifle more Irishy than necessary,” and presumably might have depressed sales to people who were anti-Catholic or anti-immigrant. § I N J ANUARY 1870, Mark Twain sent a letter from Elmira, New York, to his old friend Jim Gillis back in California, a letter rich in nostalgia and gratitude for the months he spent hiding out in Gillis’ and Stoker’s mountain retreat. “It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days,” he wrote. The times were hard, but out of that hardscrabble existence came the sto ries that would make him rich and famous. “And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn’t I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of ‘Rinaldo’ in the ‘Burning Shame’! Where is Dick and what is he doing? Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.” The mention of the performance is important, as it suggests that “The Burning Shame” as Twain first encountered it was not just a single risqué stunt but an extended storyline with at least one named character. We can picture Jim Gillis standing in front of the fireplace, his hands folded behind him, delivering that story with deadpan sincerity while his partner scampered around the cabin with a lighted candle—real or pantomimed—inserted in his rear end. For Twain it was a cherished memory, but one that he did not dare put down in print. The occasion for this letter is significant: Twain was about to marry Olivia Langdon, the woman who would be the love of his life. As his own bachelor days were drawing to a close, he was thinking about the bachelors he had known in the isolated mining camps of California, and in particular Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker. He wished they could join in the wedding festivi ties. “You can’t come so far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come, anyhow—and I invite Dick, too. And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion, we would make you right royally welcome.” From their remote refuge in the moun tains in 1864, the lives of the three men had taken divergent paths, but Mark Twain, now world famous, had not forgotten that he was once just Sam Clemens, fugitive from the San Fran cisco sheriff, rocking with laughter as Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker performed for him before the fireplace in their rough cabin on Jackass Hill. R EFERENCES Graves, Wallace. “Mark Twain’s ‘Burning Shame’,” in Nineteenth Century Fiction , vol. 23, no. 1 (June 1968). Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals. Edited by Freder ick Anderson, et al. University of California Press, 1975. Twain, Mark, Roughing It . American Publishing Co., 1872.

Closet Space You are the clothes I’ve kept hoping will come back into style or — at the very least — fit me again as once I thought you did. J AMES G AYNOR

TheG & LR

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