Now what - Mark Twain, magazine writer

Although I do not doubt that I write better when I have some idea as to what I am writing about, I am always pleased to take a run at a book with no ideas whatsoever.  The original writer already did the real work.  If I scrounge around, like a coyote or an opossum I will surely find something.  And what if I have four books at hand – what riches!

The four books, all by Mark Twain, are:

Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852-1890, of which I read everything from 1870 through 1885, 550 pages out of 950, but I read 1852 through 1869 last year and wrote several posts begun with no predetermined notions, and you remember how those turned out.

Sketches, New and Old (1875), Twain’s first proper collection of the contents of the above, mostly humor pieces written for newspapers and magazines, mostly high-quality ephemera.  Lots of overlap with the Library of America book.  I read Elizabeth Conway’s copy.  Many thanks to Ms Conway.

The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882), more of the same except in some ways different.  My copy was the warmly appreciated gift of Mrs. Katherine Warthin.

Roughing It (1872), the other book about mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada published in 1872, except that Twain’s idea of geologizing consisted entirely of striking it rich with a silver mine.  He did, in fact, strike it rich, although a lot more slowly, by learning how to write tall tales and fabrications for frontier newspapers.

Not to obsess about pages, but an interesting feature of the Library of America book is that a single year, 1870, gets 18% of the pages and by far the most tales and sketches.  Given the book’s coverage the proportion should be more like two or three percent.  Twain has just had a hit with his first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), and was in demand as a newspaper and magazine writer, a humorist, a job he was able to do, apparently, from such outposts of civilization as Elmira and Buffalo, and this was before the internet, if you can believe that.

Twain was ambitious, and he hated Buffalo, if you can believe that, so soon enough the magazine writing became intermittent and the pieces often longer and something closer to short stories.  Twain’s fame as a lecturer grew to the point where he could publish his speeches.  And he wrote more books, first another travel book – that’s Roughing It – then a mediocre novel (The Gilded Age) followed by a series of adventure books for boys.  His art and thinking deepened.  He did not stay in Buffalo and become the Dave Barry of the Gilded Age.  He could have, though, if he were a bit less of a genius.

When I compared Alphonse Allais to Twain, I was thinking of the Twain of this period, Twain as a popular magazine humorist.  Like Allais at around the same age, he had perfected his voice and his shtick.  He knew what kinds of jokes suited him and which were funny when repeated – like all humor columnists, he was highly repetitive, but of course I was supposed to read his pieces a couple of times a month, not a hundred in a row like I did.

That ought to be enough to write about, at least.