HALLEY'S Comet had a particular significance for the American novelist Mark Twain. He was born in April 1835, the year in which the comet paid its only 19th century visit, and he himself wrote: "It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I do not go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said no doubt: `Now here are two unaccountable freaks; they came in together and they must go out together'." And so they almost did. Twain died 87 years ago yesterday, on April 21st, 1910, just as Halley's Comet made its next appearance.
He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and had a variety of jobs before taking up the pen. From 1857 to 1861 he worked as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, and it was there, allegedly, that he heard the boatmen shouting "mark twain to indicate a depth of water of two fathoms. He adopted their cry as his nom de plume.
Twain was known for his irascible and sarcastic turns of phrase, frequently directed towards his two magnificent obsessions the German language and the weather. Of the former Twain remarked: "The Germans take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake; then they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder, like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German."
Warming to the same theme on another occasion, he said: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
Twain's caustic comments on the weather often referred to that of a particular place. "The coldest winter I ever spent," he once remarked, "was a summer in San Francisco."
And of other end of the country: "There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the strangest admiration and regret. The weather is always doing something there, always getting up new designs and trying them out on the people to see how they will go. In the New England spring I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours."
Personally, I like best Twain's expressed view that "weather is a literary speciality, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it". If such a speciality appeals to you, you may care to come along tonight at 7.30 to the Jonathan Swift Theatre B in the Arts Building of TCD, where one with certain pretensions in that direction will give a talk to the Friends of the Trinity Library on "Weather in Literature".