You would never come across anything like this - Tom Sawyer, Sunday-school book

Mark Twain, early on, had a long-running shtick attacking moralistic stories for children.  See, as examples, humor pieces like “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” (1865) or “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1875): “And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.”  Half of the joke is the incredulous, naïve narrator who cannot understand why things don’t go like they do in Sunday-school books:

But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this.

It occurred to me that in his second novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain was possibly writing an extended version of his old joke, the story of the bad little boy (and his even worse friend) who prosper and then some.  And I was right, that is likely the core idea of Tom Sawyer, although, eh, where does that get me.

It helps explain the passages where Tom Sawyer disappears and Twain the humor writer takes over, detachable sections mocking patent medicines, church services (“After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin board and read off ‘notices’ of meetings and societies and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom,” Ch. 5), and school Examination Days – poetry recitation and original oratory performed by twelve year-olds.  The latter had some especially good lines. 

Then arose a slim, melancholy girl, whose face had the “interesting” paleness that comes of pills and indigestion, and read a “poem.”  Two stanzas of it will do: [with respect to Twain, one would have “done”]…

This nightmare [not the poem, a speech] occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a sermon so destructive to all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize.  (Ch. 21)

Tom Sawyer is in a sense present in these scenes, but they could have been cut out and published in The Atlantic Monthly as further Old Times on the Mississippi without much trouble.

I wonder if they were cut out, in the edition of Tom Sawyer I read as a child, I mean. They were completely unfamiliar to me – likely over my head – unlike Chapter 6, when Huckleberry Finn is introduced, and each line immediately suggested the next:

Tom hailed the romantic outcast:

“Hello, Huckleberry!”

“Hello yourself, and see how you like it.”

“What's that you got?”

“Dead cat.”

“Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?”

“Bought him off'n a boy.”

“What did you give?”

“I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the slaughter-house.”

On through the spunk-water and split beans and other remedies for warts.  How many times did I read this passage, or other marvels of materiality like the list of goods Tom acquires in the fence painting chapter:

…a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog…  (Ch. 2)

I am happy to say that I had no more taste for abstract fictional goo when I was a youngster than I do now.  No more taste than Twain had – but wait, see above, “romantic outcast,” what is that?  Tomorrow: complaints about rhetoric.

An amateur, a simple amateur is all that I am - the plays of Alphonse Allais made me laugh

I have in my hands the Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais, another collection of the French humorist’s columns, monologues, and whatnots, including even a couple of miniature plays, the sequel to last year’s enlightening Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks.  That last part of the title is enough to identify the earlier book as the superior one.  No drink recipes in Selected Plays.  Dates of publication run from 1879 to 1900.

Here we are in the theatrical realm not so far from today’s stand-up comedy and yesterday’s sketch comedy.  The monologist has a little story to tell, and although one hopes the end is good the jokes and asides along the way are just as important.

The narrator is ill and receiving house calls from his doctor:

One morning when I was feeling not at all well, my doctor, after auscultating me more carefully than usual, asked me:

“Are you content with this apartment?”

“Why yes, pretty much.”

“How much is your rent?”

“Three thousand and four.”

“Is the concierge acceptable?”

And on like that.  “Etc., etc.”  I know this joke in its later New York City version.  Now a comedian would have to modify it somehow to get rid of the house call.  Plus, who’s going to have the better apartment these days, the doctor or the comic?

You really have to imagine the performance.  In “The Umbrella,” the narrator comes up with an amazing invention to keep off the rain, a silk cloth attached to a cane by rings and rods.  “That’s all there is to it, but you do have to think of it.”  He even comes up with an elegant name at the end, “’little shade’ in Italian.”  There is barely any joke aside from the monologist describing the umbrella in utter seriousness, as if he had no idea it already existed.  I’ll bet the bit killed.

“A Malcontent” is about a grump who shouts “Hooray for Boulanger,” a political slogan, whenever anything goes wrong for him, which is often, like when the bus is late.  The odd thing is that I met this fellow on a train in Paris once, an ancient man wearing a number of Catholic medals, who when forcefully informed he was sitting in the wrong seat shouted “Vive la République!  Vive la privatization!”  A true story, pointless, but true.

I wonder if I am emphasizing the wrong thing.  Allais has some importance as a forerunner of the Surrealists, and this book and Captain Cap make it clear why.  But I found myself laughing at the mother-in-law jokes,  the publisher jokes, the door-to-door salesman jokes, many of which would not have been out of place on Your Show of Shows.  The sex jokes, probably not on American television, back in the 1950s, I mean.

Somebody else can do a post about Allais as a proto-Dadaist.  I’ll just admire a humor writer who at the distance of 130 years and another language remains funny.

The book is like Captain Cap a production of Doug Skinner, friend of Wuthering Expectations, who translated, annotated, and even illustrated it.  It is another gift to English readers.  Great job; many thanks; more, please.  Title quotation from “The English Accent.”

Alphonse Allais and his pal Captain Cap, touring the bars of Montmartre - with a bonus mint julep recipe, sort of

Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks is a 1902 collection of the French humorist Alphonse Allais.  I had assumed that the humor had lost its flavor and that the book was useful as a period piece.  I was right about the latter but wrong about the former.

Allais, like any good humorist, needed a shtick – he needed a bundle of them – and Captain Cap has a great one.  Most pieces are encounters on the streets and bars of Montmartre with Captain Cap himself, who always has a new scheme, a new gadget, a new lie, and a new drink.

Early on, for example, over mint juleps, Cap describes his discovery of a cold cut mine in Quebec:  Meat-Land.  An explanation is given for the creation of such a mine that is almost plausible to those familiar with the principles of French cooking.

The cold cut mine has to be the finest creation in the book, from the Surrealist point of view, but it has lots of rivals, from the Kangacycle to the scheme to fill the French Catacombs with Arctic foxes to the Grandiose Billiards Club:

It looked as if the rain had not decided not to fall, so I proposed to Captain Cap that we play a game of billiards, simply, I added, to kill time.

“Alas!” Cap replied, “it is not we who kill time, but time that kills us!”

“Just to make it pass, then.”

“Alas!” Cap repeated, “it is not we who make time pass, but time that makes us pass.”

We could have continued quite a while with this system, so I thought it best not to insist.  (165)

In a bit of scene-setting later on the same page, Allais says he “should inform the reader, of there is still time, that the scene took place in the little white café on Blue Street – far preferable, in my opinion, to the little blue café on White Street).”

Allais has more than one arrow-through-the-head in his shtick quiver, is what I am trying to demonstrate here.

I need to get to the drinks.  The translator has helpfully catalogued all of them in an appendix.  Some of the drinks have dated where the jokes have not, like the various flips – try to find a bartender to serve you a drink with a raw egg in it.  And other drinks were once more, hmm, flexible:

The mint julep is excellent, when you can get fresh mint: crush four sprigs of the plant with a teaspoon of sugar, add a glass of cognac, fill with crushed ice, add a jigger of yellow Chartreuse, top off with water, and stir well.  Soak a spring of mint in lemon juice, and put it in the center of the glass.  Add seasonal fruits, and pour over it, without stirring, a dash of rum.  Sprinkle with sugar.  Drink with a straw. (333)

Seasonal fruits?  Yellow Chartreuse, are you insane?  And this is if anything less bizarre to me than the cocktails involving port.  Captain Cap adds port to lemonade.  How tastes change, in literature, jokes, and booze.

So this is an educational book, is what I am saying.  A period piece in the best sense.

Doug Skinner, who fortunately comments at Wuthering Expectations on occasion, is the translator.  He has enhanced the original with his own illustrations.  “Nobody said translation was easy,” Skinner notes (p. 245).

Congratulations and many thanks, Mr. Skinner!  Captain Cap is a fine contribution to English letters and Franco-American drinking.