Twain abolishes himself - There would have been results! Indeed yes.

Harper’s Bazar asked a number of authors to write on the topic “The Turning Point of My Life.”  I believe Twain’s response was his last published piece (Feb. 1910) during his lifetime.  It was not quite the last thing he wrote – that was the almost unreadable “The Death of Jean” (Christmas 1909), a howl of pain on the sudden death of his youngest daughter.

A month ago I was writing bubbling and hilarious articles for magazines yet to appear, and now I am writing – this.

So, back to the bubbles.  “Turning Point” does include, briefly, an account of Twain’s career – how I became a writer – but it is just one more data point in his decade-long argument about determinism.  All events, all endeavors, are the result of circumstance and temperament, itself pre-determined by who knows what.  We do what we do because we are the way we are, moving within a vast chain of events outside our control.  Twain became a writer because Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon – it’s a long, long chain – and because Adam ate the apple and because Sam Clemens had the measles when he was twelve.

The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times.  Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed. (932)

And there were other steps, similarly unplanned, that made Twain a printer, or a riverboat pilot, or a silver miner, or a humor writer.

Leaving the Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve-years-old. (935)

“Turning Point” is the friendly, public face of Twain’s fatalism, laid out in tedious detail in the What Is Man? pamphlet (1906), a Platonic dialogue in which the Old Man browbeats the Young Man into scientistic, psychologistic determinism, man as not a higher animal, but a middlin’ animal, somewhere below the ants.

As is normal in a Platonic dialogue, the victim sticks to the examples, rather than going after the premises, in this case taking a long time to realize that he is trapped in a logically closed system where examples are useless, even when the Old Man openly admits this to the case.  Having once sought the Truth, and having believed that he has found it,

[t]he rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and puttying and caulking my priceless possession, and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or damaging fact approaches.  (781)

Refreshing!  Determinism is Twain’s solution, to his own psychological satisfaction, to the problem of evil.  His late life obsession with Satan and Bible stories is part of his writing on theodicy.  Twain does not seem to want God and creation to be evil, so he prefers to abolish free will.  It’s all out of our hands.  The great problem with this strain of Twain’s writing is that he mostly seems to be arguing with idiots, like the Young Man in his dialogue.  Sunday school fundamentalists who do not understand their own arguments.  I see why these people are frustrating; still, maybe it would be better to give up arguing with strangers on Facebook, so to speak.

On the other hand, who does this with more spirit and laughs than Twain?  He ends “Turning Point” with an alternative world, in which the first man is Martin Luther and woman Joan of Arc, “equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos,” who resist Satan, and God.

There would have been results!  Indeed yes.  The apple would be intact to-day: there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me.  And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated.  (938)

Twain ends his career – this is the end of the piece – by abolishing himself.  This is how the Library of America Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891-1910 ends.  It is a bold move, and cosmically funny.

“Is the bull-fight a religious service?” - late Twain parodies Sherlock Holmes and I don't know what else

Two examples now of books Twain did finish in his old age, two miniature novels, A Double Barreled Detective Story (1902) and A Horse’s Tale (1906).  “Books,” “novels.”  I was confused for a while.  In editions of Twain’s Complete Stories, these texts are forty or fifty pages long – were those abridgments?  No, these pieces were published as little “books” with huge margins and almost no words per page.  I read them both in the Google Books scans of the original editions, mostly to see the illustrations, and boy did the pages fly by, in the electronic sense.

The illustrations are not worth seeking out, unfortunately.  That is Sherlock Holmes in the upper left corner, threatened by American frontier mob justice.  A Double Barreled Detective Story is in large part a Sherlock Holmes parody.  The famous non-fictional celebrity detective arrives in a Nevada mining town to visit his nephew – and why not – just as the nephew has determined to murder his employer:

“Uncle Sherlock!  The mean luck of it! – that he should come just when…”  He dropped into a reverie, and presently said to himself: “But what’s the use of being afraid of him?  Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can’t detect a crime, except when he plans it all out beforehand and arranges the clews and hires some fellow to commit it according to instructions.”  (p. 96, ellipses in original)

This is the conceit of the story, more or less.  Holmes makes wild, unfounded accusations, while another character, who has a kind of tracking superpower, solves the crime, to the extent that there is a crime to solve.  If only this were funnier.  The story of the super-tracker involves a lifelong, cross-continental search for revenge against his father, who tortured and humiliated the man’s mother; this story crosses paths with the Holmes story.   This story was a puzzler, even aside from the copyright issues.  Maybe something besides Holmes is being parodied.

That is definitely the case with A Horses’ Tale.  Much of it is narrated by the horse of Buffalo Bill Cody, during his days with U.S. cavalry, before the Wild West show.  Buffalo Bill is barely present.  Most of the story is about a nine-year-old Spanish orphan girl who arrives at the Western fort and instantly charms everyone, general and black servant, horse and dog.

Some of the scenes with the sweet little girl are nigh on unreadable.  I hope they are parody.

The story takes a strange turn when, for no discernible reason, a couple of characters beginning discussing Spanish bullfights in the cruelest possible fashion (“’I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it,’” 128).  The horses discuss the bullfight, too:

“Is the bull-fight a religious service?”

“I think so.  I have heard so.  It is held on Sunday.” (130)

And one horse tells another that he is pretty sure that horses do not go to heaven with men – his father “believed we do not have to go there unless we deserve it.”  Now that is the late Twain I have gotten to know.

Suddenly –

“Oh no, I will have to avert my gaze.  The cruel critic is about to ruin – spoil, even –  this novel by revealing its suspenseful twist.”

“What?  You’re not going to read this story!  Why would you read this?  What do you care?”

“Oh you don’t know that.  I might.”

“Oh you will not.”

– suddenly the horse and little girl go to Spain, where the horse is stolen and in a single chapter suffers the torments of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), ending in a bullfighting ring, where he is horribly, graphically, killed by a bull.  The little girl happens to be in the audience – she recognizes her beloved horse – she rushes down to the horse – she is killed by a bull!  What!  The girl had been a bugler back at the fort, and the story has quite a bit of embedded music – military bugle calls – so the story ends with “Taps.”

Twain wrote A Horse’s Tale as anti-bullfight propaganda, but boy did he have a strange way of making his case.

a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought - The Mysterious Stranger as a vehicle for Twain-stuff

For fifty years, The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance (1916) stood as Mark Twain’s final, posthumous novel.  Scholars working on the Twain archives eventually discovered that the novel was something of a fraud, a composite of several unfinished manuscripts with substantial bowdlerization and some bridging passages invented by the editor – not by Twain at all.

I haven’t read that book.  Now – by “now” I mean for the last fifty years, which does include now – the original manuscripts are available and preferable.  The editor of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), William M. Gibson, acknowledges that the carpentered version may well make for a better novel, but it ain’t Twain.

Twain messed with the story for over a decade, from 1897 to 1908.  The basic idea is that Satan comes to Hannibal, Missouri circa 1845, where he astounds people with his magic powers and permanently corrupts or enlightens young Sam Clemens.  Everything shifts around in the different versions, though.  The town moves to Austria, where Clemens happened to be when he began writing.  The time moves to the 18th century, or to the 16th.  Twain needs people to be suitably credulous about magic.

Satan becomes his nephew, or Satan, Jr., perhaps Satan’s 44th son, thus “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.”  He always appears as a boy, a companion for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who appear in the “Schoolhouse Hill” fragment, or their early modern Austrian equivalents.

The Satan figure is always the most interesting – only interesting – character.  He is a mix of theorist, prankster, ignoramus, truth-teller, obfuscator, and paradoxologist.  He is not obviously evil, and is perhaps well-intended.

At some point in each attempt, Twain becomes obsessed and delighted with his angel’s superpowers, and spends too many pages astounding the humans.  Much of this material is inventive – a maid who is turned into a cat in “No. 44” provides a lot of fun – but dramatically static.

Same goes for the satire – the undermining of received religion and glimpses of the future:

“Two centuries from now [i.e., in 1902],” he said, “the Christian civilization will reach the highest mark.  Yet its kings will still be, then, what they are now, a close corporation of land-thieves.  Is that an advance?  England will be prodigious and strong; she will bear the most honorable name that ever a nation bore, and she will lose it in a single little shameful war and carry the blot and stench of it to the end of her days.  To please a dozen rich adventurers her statesmen will pick a quarrel with a couple of wee little Christian farmer-communities, and send against that half dozen villages the mightiest army that ever invaded any country, and will crush those little nations and rob them of their independence and their land.”  (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” Ch. 9)

None of this is much help in finding out whether good Father Peter will escape the inquisition and bad Father Adolf get his comeuppance, which is nominally the story.  But pretty soon I was not worrying much about story, but reading these texts as a vehicle for Twain-stuff.  There was never going to be a coherent novel.  If Twain had lived longer, there would be a fourth unfinished version, and a fifth.

Twain did write an ending for “No. 44,” even if he never brought the story near it.  Here it is:

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell.  It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.  Nothing exists but You.  And You are but a Thought – a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

But that is Satan talking, or a near relative, and we all know how far to trust him; and in fact it is not even Satan but Mark Twain, and we all know how far to trust him.

old Twain - a list - because I believed in him and could not think he would deceive a mere boy

What was Mark Twain writing in his old age?  I have to make a list.  It is a complex subject.  He lost interest in books, but he wrote an immense amount of stuff.

I am thinking of approximately 1900 through 1910.  Twain has returned from his successful world tour (written up as Following the Equator, 1898) which make him a mountain of money.  But his daughter died, his wife was ill, his nation won a war and its leaders chose to become the kind of imperial power Twain so despised in Europe, and Twain was finding the limits of being the world’s most famous writer.

For my own sake, some categories:

1.  The so called “dark writings,” a series of dream narratives involving ships on endless journeys, dogs dying in fires, and strange microscopic worlds that look like attempts to cope with trauma.  I read a chunk of this material in a collection titled The Devil’s Race-Track, and wrote a bit about it.  The writing is rough, not just unfinished but unfinishable – stories about endless entrapment present narrative difficulties – but the imagery and vision are original.

2.  Similarly, Twain returned several times to a cluster of ideas that emerged posthumously as The Mysterious Stranger (1916) but can now be read in the three distinct manuscripts that were mashed together to create the “novel.”  In each case, a boyish Satan figure – Satan’s 44th son, or a nephew – comes to town and upends things with his magic powers and view that humans are a kind of animal.

3.  Twain becomes obsessed with Satan, “a sacred character, being mentioned in the Bible” (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, p. 41), and he becomes a frequent mouthpiece, a suitably distant observer of the follies of mankind.  Adam and Eve are also recurring figures.  Just as the “Mysterious Stranger” story is tied up with Twain’s Hannibal childhood, the satirical use of the Old Testament stories is a return to the Sunday school of sixty years previous.  The Sunday schools I attended in the 1970s do not sound much different that Twain’s from the 1840s.

As long as Twain did not get into sex, as in “Letters from the Earth” (1909), these stories were publishable.  Twain put a letter in Harper’s Weekly in 1905 in the voice of and signed by Satan (“A Humane Word from Satan”).

4.  Twain’s philosophy, most tediously expressed in What Is Man?, a Platonic dialogue about a purely deterministic universe.  This pamphlet, published anonymously, was dull but helpful, since it clearly states the metaphysical position that shows up everywhere in this period.  Reading this, I knew that Twain meant it.  Some of it.

5.  On the other hand, this is the time of Twain’s most active political involvement, writing scathingly and hilariously against American control of the Philippines, Christian missionaries in China, and the Belgian atrocities in the Congo.  All of this in public.  The pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905) is a terrific piece of rhetoric, an inhumane word from a human Satan.

6.  “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), “The $30,000 Request” (1904) – stories about how money – the possibility of money – ruins lives.  Published in popular magazines, and again in best-selling collections.  Highly effective.  Abolished greed for a time.  Not sure what happened since.

7.  Did everyone else know about Twain’s Sherlock Holmes story, A Double Barreled Detective Story (1902)?  How did the copyright work?  Similarly curious is A Horse’s Tale (1906), much of it from the point of view of Buffalo Bill’s horse, a nasty shocker apparently designed to terrify children.

8.  Once in a while, Twain felt the urge to write a perfect, signature humor piece, just like in the old days.  Something like “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey” (1906):

I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of the United States one morning, because I believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was trusting her and considering her honest.

Maybe some kind of allegory in there.

I don’t know why anyone else would read this, but it was helpful to write.  I’ll poke at some of these over the next couple of days.

for we came to believe that it had a soul and that it was in hell - Mark Twain's The Devil's Race-Track

The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s Great Dark Writings, University of California Press, 1980, and how can you resist a book that tells you right in the title that the contents are great?  It’s a sure thing.

Personally, I thought the contents were varied in quality – varied in “dark,” too – but absolutely fascinating.  The book consists entirely of writing from a narrow period (1896-1908) unpublished by Twain, sometimes because of its irreligious content, often because the piece was unfinished, and if it was unfinished it was likely because Twain had written himself into a dark, weird corner.

The book is a way to see Twain’s mind at work during a period of crisis.  Twain had gone bankrupt, and while on a worldwide lecture tour to recover his fortune, his daughter, at home in Hartford, died of spinal meningitis.  Twain’s wife began to suffer from serious health problems and would die in 1904.  Twain was never exactly a ray of sunshine, but one result of his suffering was this body of savage, angry, fearful unpublished writing.

The core of the book is a series of linked, unfinished, symbolically charged writings in which Twain keeps returning to stories he doesn’t know how, or doesn’t want, to finish.  A beloved dog alerts a ship’s crew that the ship is on fire, saving them, but the captain leaves the dog behind to die.  A ship becomes trapped in an endless current, The Devil’s Race-Track, and somehow escapes only to find itself in an area of perfect calm, “a trap; and that trap was the Everlasting Sunday” (“The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness,” 34).  The compass not only does not work, but

acted like a frightened thing, a thing in frantic fear for its life.  And so we got afraid of it, and could not bear to look at its distress and its helpless struggles; for we came to believe that it had a soul and that it was in hell.  (34-5)

That is dark, and quite strange.

A father experiences great success, or else catastrophe – a house destroyed by fire, a bankruptcy – one of which is real, one a dream.  “Which Was the Dream?” is the title of that one.

Another endless sea voyage in “The Great Dark,” this time across a microscope slide, the ship constantly threatened by microscopic monstrosities.  The characters vaguely remember a different life, perhaps a dream life, in which they were regular people, on shore, perhaps looking into a microscope.

Almost a third of the book is filled by “Three Thousand Years among the Microbes.”  The narrator is transformed by a magician “into a cholera-germ when he was trying to turn me into a bird” (?) so he spends the next three thousand years (germ years, not human) in the body of the tramp Blitzkowski.  The result is something like Twain humor mixed with Calvino’s Cosmicomics:

I often think of a talk I once had upon some of these things with a friend of mine, a renowned specialist by the name of Bblbgxw, a name which I have to modify to Benjamin Franklin because it is so difficult for me to pronounce that combination right; but that is near enough anyway, because when a foreigner pronounces it it always sounds a little like Franklin, when it doesn’t sound like Smith.  (176)

Bblbgxw is a yellow-fever germ.  That tramp is in rough shape.  But in the end, it is fiction about entropy, ending – or never ending – in the Devil’s Race-Track or Everlasting Sunday, unfinished, unfinishable, sad metaphors for the writer who works through his grief in the only way he knows.

the vision vanished away; we were prisoners in this dull planet again - Twain darkens

This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life.  (from “About Play-acting,” 1898)

Mark Twain is describing a Viennese play, not his own writing circa 1898, but, well.  I have been enjoying the Library of America Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891-1910, the writings from 1891 through 1898, to be specific.  Just one long laugh.  I don’t really know what Twain meant by “soulful.”

Some funny, funny stuff in this period, most famously that magnificent piece of literary spite “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895), but plenty of others.  I found “About All Kinds of Ships” to be a killer, from the title on down, but I will not insist on that opinion.  My kind of humor.

Behind the scenes, but visible to readers now – I wonder how visible to contemporary readers – Mark Twain was turning into Dark Twain.  A series of catastrophes, personal and financial, had struck Samuel Clemens, and he began to write more unpublishable pieces alongside his usual productions, with religious and political opinions unpalatable to the magazine audience.

So there is the “Extract from Adam’s Diary” (1893), on a religious subject but just a good comedy revue sketch, ready for Your Show of Shows:

The new creature eats too much fruit.  We are going to run short, most likely.

Many pages of the bit involve Adam trying to figure out what kind of a critter a baby might be – a fish, or maybe a kangaroo, or, eventually, a talking bear.  He never does learn where Eve gets them.

But a few years later he writes, just for himself, “Man’s Place in the Animal World” (1896, pub. 1962), in which he suggests a modification of Darwinism, replacing the Ascent of Man with “a new and truer” theory, “the Descent of Man.”

Man is the Religious Animal.  He is the only Religious Animal.  He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them.  He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.  He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

I would not want to argue that any of Twain’s arguments are original; some of his jokes, yes.  He ends with the “grim suggestion: that we are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed we were.”

“Which Was the Dream?” (1897, pub. 1966) contains some of the most boring passages I have ever come across in Twain.  He is suppressing his voice for conceptual reasons while he establishes the perfect life of his narrator – perfect career, wife, children, wealth – before destroying the first and last.  The title of the story suggests what is going to happen, that the preposterously ideal beginning – the war hero narrator is, for example, a Senator who is expected to be elected President of the United States as soon as he is old enough – will dissolve when the character wakes up.  No, not exactly.

I was in the room that had been set apart as a nursery, and was employed as usual at that hour of the evening – inventing a blood-curdling story for the children; a child seated on each arm of my chair, their feet in my lap, their elbows on their knees, their chins crutched in their plump hands, their eyes burning duskily through their falling cataracts of yellow hair and black.  For ten minutes I had been wandering with these two in a land far from this world; in the golden land of Romance, where all things are beautiful, and existence is a splendid dream, and care cannot come.  Then came the bray of the brazen horns, and the vision vanished away; we were prisoners in this dull planet again.

And this comes before the character is ruined.  Reading “Which was the Dream?” was like reading a hyperbolized version of Twain’s diary.  He was never at risk of being elected President, nor did he fall back to a log cabin, but he is working through his own crises in fiction here.  No need to publish it, but a strong need to write it.

"I's sole down de river!" - some ragged notes on Pudd'nhead Wilson

Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), what a strange novel.  First, that apostrophe – there should be two, right?

Second, Twain’s original idea was to write a novel about conjoined twins – Italian, why not – who for some reason move to a Missouri river town.  What he wrote in the end was an early Elmore Leonard novel, a crime novel.  The twins are still there as pure plot devices and comedy, but separated.  Yet the conjoined twins survive as ghosts, as imperfect edits.

Here a prodigious slam-banging broke out below, and everybody rushed down to see.  It was the twins knocking out a classic four-handed piece on the piano, in great style. (Ch. 6)

This chapter is the strangest, with the twins separate but inseparable, separate only because I had earlier been told that they are. “The twins took a position near the door, the widow stood at Luigi’s side, Rowena stood beside Angelo, and the march-past and the introductions began.”  This sentence is obviously unchanged from the conjoined draft.

Vladimir Nabokov had a long nurtured idea to write a novel about conjoined twins, until his wife, as I understand it, ordered him to abandon it.  A remnant survives as “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” (1958), as I remember it his single worst story by far.  What do writers see in this terrible idea?

Third and finally, Pudd’nhead Wilson is even more ferociously ironic – problematic, as some say today – about race slavery than Huckleberry Finn.  A black nanny, a slave, switches her son, 1/32nd black but 32/32nds enslaved, with her master’s son.  Twain builds the plot on the single cruelest aspect of American chattel slavery, even more than its violence, the separation of families, whether the result of events or, as is threatened repeatedly in the novel, as punishment.  Twain runs the thread all the way to the last line of the book.

The former and future slave grows up to be a scheming monster, so interesting that whatever Twain’s plans might have been he and his crimes gets most of the book’s attention.  His mother, the baby switcher, is a Strong Female Character, is she ever, pretty fearsome herself.

Then there’s some nonsense about finger printing and a bejeweled knife, an adjunct to those ludicrous twins.  A murder, a courtroom revelation, topsy-turvy world restored.  All in the most fast-moving, bare bones Twain prose I can remember.  No stops for humorous diversions or lyrical idylls.  No time to waste and I believe, in real life, some pretty big bills to pay.

The running battle with Walter Scott and Southern honor is only briefly alluded to in the form of a dueling scene, which includes Twain’s old gag that in an American duel the seconds and spectators are as likely to be hit as the combatants.

I cannot remember why I had not previously read this novel.  Is it somehow thought of, or in the past thought of, as a book for children?  If I had read it as a child, I could write about how badly I had misunderstood it, but as it is I am stuck with implicitly writing about how badly I understand it now.

Twain's Connecticut Yankee, a book about books - good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) long ago, long, long ago, I already knew that it was a mishmash of stories, King Arthur stories blended with other things.  An American engineer and pragmatist is transported to 6th century England, allowing lots of mockery of the tropes, if I am using that word right, of Arthurian stories and adventure fiction more generally.

Now, corrupted by knowledge, I can see that it is also a mishmash of books.  Not just King Arthur stuff, although once in a while Mark Twain just plops in a chunk of Thomas Malory, but Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote.  Robinson Crusoe:

But perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn't any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco.  I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did – invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy.  Well, that was in my line.  (Ch. 7)

More subtly, just slightly, Connecticut Yankee is part of Twain’s continuing argument with Walter Scott’s phony baloney medievalism and its damaging influence on the American South.

The practical puzzle to me has been that of the seven Scott novels I have read only one, Ivanhoe (1820) is a medieval story.  The Scott I know is Scottish, and his history is modern, not medieval.  Yet the ethos of the Scottish novels, a world of glory and honor in the service of lost causes, goes directly to Twain’s criticisms.

Luckily, though, Twain ignored me and did not send his American back to Covenanter Scotland, because almost no one cares about that history any more, while King Arthur stories are still endlessly copied and retold.  We still get the jokes.  Also, it allows Twain and his stand-in to abolish slavery.

The narrator, the man sent back in time by a knock on the head, is not just a “practical Connecticut man” (Ch. 2) but an engineer, so a man of knowledge, yes, but also a hardhead:

… if on the other hand it was really the sixth century, all right, I didn’t want any softer thing: I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upwards.  I’m not a man to waste time after my mind’s made up and there’s work on hand…

This is in Chapter 2, so a snap decision.  What any qualified Yankee would do.  Soon enough telephone lines are strung throughout the kingdom, factories are producing gunpowder, and newspapers are published that have “good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better than was needed in Arthur’s day and realm” (Ch. 26, “The First Newspaper”).  But he is also an idealist, attacking slavery, chivalry, and kingship.  His ultimate goal is to overthrow the Catholic Church.  Connecticut Yankee is – here are more books – a Utopian novel in the sense that it is a Lucianic satire.  The ignorance of mankind is laid bare and mocked without mercy, but the narrator’s Yankee certainty takes plenty of hits, too.

He’d call it an adventure - Huck Finn vs Walter Scott, and the struggle to find Jim

Mark Twain had presented his argument against Walter Scott in Life on the Mississippi.  He returns to it in Huckleberry Finn and in fact makes it a principle, if submerged, theme of the novel.  It explains some of the unpleasantness of the novel’s final episode.

Southerners developed an ethical system that was a fantasy based on novels; that is Twain’s argument.  The novels are not really the issue, just useful stand-ins for a critique of Southern culture – the over-emphasis on honor, the duels and feuds, the glorification of violence, and the pride in lost causes – all of this on top of a dehumanizing system of chattel slavery, which was also part of the fantasy, allowing slave-owners to think of themselves as feudal chiefs.

Tom Sawyer is the novel’s representative of this ideology.  He wants to turn everything into an adventure story, a less innocent pastime than it first seems.  By the end of a novel, Sawyer is revealed as a sociopath, completely indifferent to human suffering and all too proud of his new bullet wound.  The irony of that detail is pretty ugly.

I love Huckleberry Finn for his independence and his ability to make moral decisions – “’All right, then, I'll go to hell’” (Ch. 31), right?  “It was awful thought, and awful words, but they was said.”  The escaped slave Jim becomes his friend, as human as himself.

Yet Finn cannot free himself from Tom Sawyer.  Jim and Huck come upon a steamboat wreck.  Jim says skip it; Huck says:

“Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing?  Not for pie, he wouldn’t?  He’d call it an adventure – that’s what he’d call it; and he’d land on that wreck if it was his last act.  And wouldn’t he throw style into it?...  I wish Tom Sawyer was here.”  (Ch. 12)

Six pages later, just by the way, we learn the name of the steamboat:

“On the wreck.”

“What wreck?”

“Why, there ain’t but one.”

“What, you don’t mean the Walter Scott?”  (Ch. 13)

Huck had also wished Tom were present while he was emptying out Pap’s cabin and faking his own death.  Whatever problems a reader might have with the final episode of the novel, when Tom Sawyer engineers Jim’s escape from imprisonment, but only on Tom’s insane terms, as if they were all in a Dumas novel, you can’t say that Twain had not set things up.  Thematically, the ending logically follows.

The episode is deeply uncomfortable.  However resourceful Huck is on his own, he is crushed in the presence of Tom Sawyer, servile, even.  He achieves a powerful moral breakthrough about his friend Jim and then abandons it without a fight.  I understand why people dislike the ending.  It is unpleasant.

No more unpleasant, though, than what Jim has been experiencing throughout the novel.  He already lives away from his family, his wife and two children living on a Missouri farm while he works in town.  He flees slavery because of a threat that he will be sold away from his family.  He hopes to work in Illinois and buy his family.  The further he floats south – the longer Tom Sawyer keeps him chained up in prison – the more he risks not only personal violence but the loss of his family.

For Huck Finn, family is something to escape, plus he is just a boy.  How can he understand any of this?  The young reader has the same excuse.  The adult reader ought to struggle to bring Jim out from the background.

Much of the above is indebted to John Keene’s story “Rivers,” from Counternarratives (2015), in which Jim tells his story.  It is a fine piece of literary criticism.

It's lovely to live on a raft - Huckleberry Finn in his habitat

The materiality of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn extends to its landscape.  The mechanics of the flow of the Mississippi River, its weather , vegetation, and fish, and then all of the human adaptations, especially the watercraft, form the story at minor and major points, to the extent that Twain abandoned the novel for a long time when his characters reached the Ohio River.  Down the Mississippi – that’s one novel – up the Ohio – that’s another.  And what did Twain know about the Ohio River?

It was useful to have recently read The Return of the Native (1878) and even The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), a pair that could have been written – I don’t know that they were – landscape-first.  The writer imagines the place and then wonders what stories might occur there.  Huckleberry Finn must have been imagined character-first, since Huck is pulled from Tom Sawyer, but he’s a river rat, inseparable from the setting.

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line – that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away – trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks – rafts; … and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!  (Ch. 19)

I made a big chop in the middle of the most rapturous passage in the novel, a 266 word descriptive sentence that I will admit is not entirely credible coming from Huck Finn.  Perhaps his stenographer has cleaned it up a little, maybe added a little from his own observations.  I am sure glad I read Life on the Mississippi (1883), too, finally, so I can see how the novel informs the memoir and travel book, and how Twain’s return to the river for that book helped him solve the problems he had been having with the novel.  I think of Twain on the deck of the steamboat, seeing Huck and Jim ahead of him on their raft.  What are they doing out there?

“You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft,” says Huck at the end of Chapter 18, just before the  long idyllic passage partly quoted above.

Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time.  Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark – which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two – on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts.  It's lovely to live on a raft.  (Ch. 19)

This passage, Huck’s days in Arcadia, is a high point of the novel.  Ethically, it is so complex.  There are two people on that raft.

Mark Twain piles up stuff - The statements was interesting, but tough

Let’s move the interior decorating and furniture theme to the United States.  Huckleberry Finn has been locked in a forest cabin by his abusive, drunken Pap.  He has sawed his way out, though, and is furnishing a canoe, unfurnishing the cabin:

I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug.  I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; I took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot.  I took fish-lines and matches and other things – everything that was worth a cent.  I cleaned out the place.  I wanted an axe, but there wasn't any, only the one out at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave that.  I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.  (Ch. 7)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is a material novel, more purely concerned with things than almost any American novel of the time, up there with Moby-Dick.  I read this passage, and the entire surrounding episode, with fascination as a child.  I could not guess how many times I read this chapter, which is only about thirty pages into the novel, and a natural place to stop, apparently.

Did I read other similar passages with similar interest, say where Robinson Crusoe scavenges the wrecked ship, a scene that Mark Twain is inverting?  I most surely did.  Or how about the end of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck and Tom Sawyer dig into Jim’s cabin and fill it with garbage, parodying his own earlier scene?  “I did wish Tom Sawyer was there,” Huck says back in Chapter 7.  He eventually gets his wish.

Here we find the hidden key to the aesthetics of Wuthering Expectations.  Piles of stuff, please.

The other great household goods scene is in Chapter 17, when Huck describes the luxurious house of the feud-ridden Grangerfords.  “Nothing couldn’t be better,” he says.  The door has a doorknob.  There is a clock with “a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy.”  A patriotic table cloth from Philadelphia.  A “little old piano… that had tin pans in it, I reckon.”  Books, of course, including a Bible and

“Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why.  The statements was interesting, but tough.  [Accurate!]

Best known are the pictures by a deceased daughter, the proto-Goth Emmeline Grangerford, which range from melancholy absurdism to Lovecraftian nightmare.  “These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little, they always gave me the fan-tods.”  How many times have I read this chapter?  “It was very good poetry…  If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain’t no telling what she could a done by-and-by.”

This perfect home, with its fancy doorknob and clock and so on is maintained by slave labor and is inhabited by a family of bloodthirsty sociopaths.  There’s an argument, an ideology, in that furniture.

very rare, possibly a "unique" - Twain's travel hodgepodges

A note on Mark Twain’s loose sense of structure in his early books.  They are such hodgepodges.  A bit of travel writing, a tall tale, some reasonably authentic memoir, a joke, an old newspaper piece, more travel writing, ordered as the materials are removed from Twain’s desk.  The voice pulls it all together, the sensibility.

Life on the Mississippi (1883) begins with a geography lesson, and then a history capsule stolen almost entirely from Francis Parkman followed by a genuine excerpt from “a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more” (Ch. 3).  A chunk of Huckleberry Finn, in other words, “some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy,” actually completed in only two more years.

The excerpt has very little Finn in it – he is eavesdropping on some keelmen.    It now occurs to me what a difficult leap Twain made when he set his own voice aside and wrote Huckleberry Finn in the first person.

The early books are designed to be broken in pieces, even the novels.  The Gilded Age (1873) is mostly a compendium of the novelistic clichés of its day, but specific passages are outstanding, including a piece of pure travel writing about Washington, D.C. and a long joke about – let’s call its fashions in health care for dependents – that is among the funniest Twain writings I have ever encountered.  The book is worth reading once just to discover the parts that are worth reading again.

I find myself becoming impatient with the more straightforward travel writing in Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi.  Get to the funny stuff, Sam.  And he always does, soon enough.  The value of one more 19th century description of Italy is in passages like the long gag where Twain and his doctor friend decide to never be enthusiastic, no matter what the guide shows them.  Well, really they pretend to be idiots:

He brought us before the beautiful bust – for it was beautiful – and sprang back and struck an attitude:

“See, genteelmen! – Mummy!  Mummy!”

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

“Ah, – Ferguson [Twain and the doctor have call their guide Ferguson]– what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name was?”

“Name? – he got no name! – Mummy! – 'Gyptian mummy!”

“Yes, yes.  Born here?”

“No!  'Gyptian mummy!”

“Ah, just so.  Frenchman, I presume?”

“No! – not Frenchman, not Roman! – born in Egypta!”

“Born in Egypta.  Never heard of Egypta before.  Foreign locality, likely.  Mummy – mummy.  How calm he is – how self-possessed.  Is, ah—is he dead?”  (Innocents Abroad, Ch. 27)

I suppose it is barely possible that Twain has, in a callous disregard for truth, invented all of this for the petty and corrupting amusement of his readers.

I have not read The Tramp Abroad (1880), about Twain’s walking tour of Germany and its neighbors, but I see that by the second chapter he has been led to a story that should have been in Roughing It, about a man who thinks he can talk to birds; a comic story about a frustrated California blue jay fills Chapter 3.  Why Twain had to go to Germany to find a place to put this story I do not know.  Hey, A Tramp Abroad is also the source of “The Awful German Language” (Appendix D).  I may have read more of this book than I realized:

I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German.  I spoke entirely in that language.  He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a “unique”; and wanted to add it to his museum.

These books must be unreadably bizarre to the reader who does not find Twain funny.

measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote - Twain versus Scott in Life on the Mississsippi

First they read Walter Scott.  It was like the shock of a new world revealed.  (Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Ch. 6, tr. Mark Polizzotti)

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building [of Louisiana]; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances.  The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books.  (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883, Ch. 40)

Twain’s great screed against Walter Scott is in Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 46.  I have long wondered to what extent he meant it.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.  (Ch. 46)

In the next line he does call this a “wild proposition.”  His argument is that for some unspecified reason, Southern culture was especially susceptible to Scott’s “Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.”

Twain returns to the idea enough that I think he did mean it.  Tom Sawyer is Twain’s Scott-damaged representative, harmless enough in his own book but dangerous in the notorious last episode of Huckleberry Finn (1885).  That much-hated ending has almost convinced me that Twain was right, although he puts too much emphasis on the medieval Scott, when his Scottish novels are more important (and also better novels).

The Southern gentility, much of it descended from the people depicted in Scott’s novels, embraced the ethos of honor and glory they read about in the novels as their own, along with an ugly modernization of the clannishness.  Losing the war only added to the identification with Scott’s doomed loyalists and fanatics, sacrificing everything for the Young Pretender or radical Calvinism, depending on which novel seemed most appealing.  That Scott and his protagonists are generally on the other side is beside the point.

Much of the decline of Scott comes from the massive shifts in our idea of honor – true no matter who I mean by “our,” I think – and the replacement of glory with celebrity.  Twain, one of his time’s greatest celebrities, writes as an opponent of the old honor.

[Scott] did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.

So, that first line aside, I just about half believe Twain, maybe about as much as he believed himself.

Life on the Mississippi is, setting the Scott chapter aside, great fun from beginning to end – “The Mississippi is well worth reading about” (Ch. 1).  It is about one-third the memoir of Twain’s time as a cub pilot in the 1850s, and two-thirds a travel book with Twain revisiting the river.  I had thought the proportions were reversed.  At times I wished the proportions were reversed.  I mean, the glory days of the steamboats, what a time.  A visit to St. Paul – Twain is thorough – is not as interesting, even in Twain’s hands.  The proportion of nonsense and digression is satisfyingly similar to other Twain “non-fiction.”

Crane and Twain put some comedy in their recital - The Private History of a Campaign that Failed

Crane writes about courage in its different forms in the stories in The Little Regiment, just as he does in The Red Badge of Courage.  I thought I should write “courage and cowardice,” but in the stories, unlike the novel, there is little in the way of cowardice.  The courageous characters are not just soldiers but also civilians, young women caught among invading troops, or the inhabitants of an Indiana town worried that a “rebel” is stealing their chickens – well, there is plenty of cowardice in that one (“The Indiana Campaign,” but it is played for laughs), or even the protagonist of Red Badge, brought back as an old man, courageous enough in his own interest at least.  The novel is condensed into a couple of paragraphs.  “Evidently he appreciated some comedy in this recital.”

Bierce’s war stories were generally sources of comedy, too, not just in his fiction but as much or more so in his memoirs, in Bits of Autobiography (1909), where his tone is permanently amused.  But Bierce finds death as a concept to be amusing, which is not Crane’s position, however their sense of irony might overlap; nor is it the position of Mark Twain in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (1885), his memoir of his wartime “service” as a Missouri irregular on the side of the Confederacy.

Among the ironies of the title is the fact that Twain succeeded in getting out of the war without doing too much, or possibly any, harm.

There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run.  And yet it learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the great battles later.  I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited.  I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.

The story of a bunch of Tom Sawyers playing soldier in the woods and retreating whenever a rumor passes by is well built for amusement:

Then we formed in line of battle and marched four miles to a shady and pleasant piece of woods on the border of the far-reaching expanses of a flowery prairie.  It was an enchanting region for war – our kind of war.

No one follows orders; no one knows how to ride a horse; no one knows much of anything.  The captain is named Dunlap, but since he “was young, ignorant, good-natured, well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love-ditties” he Frenchifies his name to d’un Lap.  The great skill of this Missouri Quixote is giving names to the soldiers’ camps.

I am taking “The Private History” as a memoir, but it is likely full of lies.  The lies are at least consistent with other lies Twain tells in other works.  The episode I doubt the most is the one where Twain and his comrades fire on a man and kill him.

My campaign was spoiled.  It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child’s nurse.  I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.

And like Huck Finn will later, or earlier, Twain lights out for the Territory.

The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain in the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows

Last fall, reading too many challenging books in a row – Walter Pater, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Yves Bonnefoy – I vowed to switch to a diet of nothing but adventure novels for boys.  I have lapsed from that vow, but I did read Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881).

In memory, The Prince and the Pauper has been a fantasy novel for me, a fairy tale, which it is, sure.  The title prince was a fairy tale prince living in a fairy tale palace, expelled into a fairy tale world.

But he is also the future Edward VI, his father the king is Henry VIII, and the city, explored in some detail, in 16th century London.  The novel is a clever blend of standard fairy tale plots with the historical fiction of Walter Scott.  It is a genuine historical novel in the enormous Tudor genre, with the unlikely events of the plot cleverly turned into the causes of all sorts of actual events, events that Twain modifies as little as possible.

Twain’s great cultural and sociological attack on Scott is in Life on the Missisippi was published two years later.  Twain’s formal innovation in The Prince and the Pauper is to drop long passages by historians directly into the text, while Scott exiled such things to his endless appendices (Twain has those, too – “It was not till the end of this reign (Henry VIII.) that any salads, carrots, turnips, or other edible roots were produced in England” (!!!) writes David Hume in his History of England, quoted in Twain’s note to Ch. 7).  And why not.

When I last read The Prince and the Pauper, a long time ago, I suppose I had no idea who Henry VIII was, no idea that much of anything in the book was real.  He might as well have been the fairy tale king of Portugal* for all I knew.  And then the rest of the historical specificity of the novel seeped away.  It was a treat to revisit the novel knowing what the heck Twain was writing about.

In a nod to Don Quixote, a soldier, confronted with a boy in rags who insists he is a prince, let’s Twain acknowledge the fantasy novel that I remembered:

After a little, he went on, "And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!  A most odd and strange position, truly, for one so matter-of-fact as I.  I will not laugh – no, God forbid, for this thing which is so substanceless to me is real to him.” (Ch. 12)

The inversion of Don Quixote is a clever touch.  Scott supplies the model for the historical novel, the solid earth; Cervantes the dreams and shadows, the magic; Twain the energy, anger, and jokes.

*  In Italy, Portugal is a fairy tale kingdom.  See Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales.

2016 plans - some readalongs, some American literature

First, planting some flags:

The long Spanish novel La Regenta (1886) by Leopoldo Alas aka Clarín in July.  I remember that there was some interest in a readalong.  Please see seraillon for more on this tempting novel – “belongs with the greatest of psychological novels,” “something memorable on nearly every page,” etc.

Goethe’s travel memoir Italian Journey (1816) in November.  A subtly strange book, with a Goethe quite unlike the one known by readers who for some reason think The Sorrows of Young Werther is “autobiographical.”  For one thing, the author of Italian Journey is alive.  This book may also belong with the greatest of psychological novels, even if it is not a novel.

Maybe I will follow along with The Little Professor’s Nineteenth-century Gothic literature course, at least the texts I have not read.

Second, the American literature non-Challenge:

For several years, I have picked some easily and narrowly defined literary tradition to read around in and attached to it a phoney baloney, parodic “challenge,” which mostly involved me reading books I wanted to read anyways.  But as I approach the end of the 19th century – the chronological creep of my reading is obvious, right? – I see that many of the books that I want to read soon are American – the United States kind of American – and from the 1880s and 1890s or a bit later.  Books I have never read, or last read in college, or even, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, since my childhood.

I have never had any particular interest in American literature, which in a way is a shame.  It is my tradition, the one in which I live, the one in which I do not need to learn everything from scratch as I have done with Russian and French literature and even English literature.  Pounds and shillings, dukedoms and baronetcies, Suffolk and Norfolk, rotten boroughs, that sort of thing, rather than the deeper understanding I could have of American literature (rereading this sentence - who am I kidding?).

My college American Lit II class and its assigned Norton anthology served me well, too.  There are good arguments against worrying too much about “coverage” in literature survey courses, but boy did coverage ever work for me, in the sense that I crammed in a little bit by a lot of American writers which later allowed me to read magazine articles with a reasonable level of understanding.  Go ahead and refer to Vachel Lindsay or Hamlin Garland, I’ve read them.  A poem, a story, something.

Well, I am ready to do better.

In practice this means a lot of Mark Twain and Henry James.  I will test my appetite for both writers.  Say The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), another short 19th century novel, and one of the three long late novels.  A good sampling of the tales.  That sounds like a lot of Henry James.  We’ll see.

A commenter suggested I save James’s ghost stories for an October readalong.  What a good idea.  Yes, let’s do that.

Twain is easier.  Huckleberry Finn (1885), Connecticut Yankee (1889), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), the Joan of Arc novel (1895), some of the later, darker works, lots of his shorter stuff, stories and speeches and throwaway jokes.  Maybe another travel book besides Life on the Mississippi (1883), which I am reading now.

A William Dean Howells novel.  The Awakening.  Lots of Stephen Crane.  More Edith Wharton – I’ve read nothing but Ethan Frome.  The Damnation of Theron Ware.  Finish Parkman’s history of Quebec.  More so-called Naturalists – Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London.

Poetry is a problem.  The 1880s and 1890s saw the Great Winnowing of the American Poets, with the deaths of Bryant in 1878 and then Lanier (1881), Emerson and Longfellow (1882), Dickinson (1886), Melville (1891), and Whittier and Whitman (1892).  Some were retired; others, like Melville, were still writing good poetry.  Much of the next generation of talent died young, like Crane.  The casualty rate of poets born in the 1870s is horrifying.

I want to get to know Edwin Arlington Robinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar better.  Any opinions about George Santayana’s poetry?  Things get really interesting in the 1910s, but I doubt I will get that far.  I’ll mostly look elsewhere for poetry.

I am looking forward to reading some high proportion of these books, but I cannot suppress the suspicion that the result will be the most boring year of Wuthering Expectations.  Or most boring nine months, or six months, or however long before I can’t stand it anymore and want to gorge myself on French weirdos.

If anything here looks interesting, let me know and we can coordinate.  A lot of these books are mercifully short.  Suggestions for more books are perpetually welcome.

That ain't the way it is in the book - some Tom Sawyer goo - there was no getting around the authorities

The great surprises for me in revisiting Tom Sawyer were the narrator’s varied rhetorical modes, away from boy’s book storytelling and aside from the inset humor writing.  Passages like:

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step…  Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

So begins Chapter 2, the home of the famous fence-painting episode, the first strong dose of Tom Sawyer’s ingenuity, imagination and ruthlessness.  There is no way that the above language belongs to Tom.  It is the narrator almost mocking Tom, laughing at him because he has to waste this wonderful day doing chores.  Tom Sawyer’s sentiments, but someone else’s language.

A lot of this is parody, mild but targeting the conventional language of Twain’s competition, although as parody it is too pure, slack language that knows itself to be slack, as when Tom is mooning over a girl who will not come to her window: 

And thus he would die – out in the cold world, with no shelter over his homeless head, no friendly hand to wipe the death-damps from his brow, no loving face to bend pityingly over him when the great agony came.  And thus she would see him when she looked out upon the glad morning – and Oh! would she drop one little tear upon his poor, lifeless form, would  she heave one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blighted, so untimely cut down?  (Ch. 3)

Then the maid pours a bucket of “water” over Tom and he throws a rock through a pane of glass.  That’s more like it.

Perhaps some of that really is meant to be Tom’s language, though, or the language to which he aspires.  It is Tom Sawyer who is the great reader in the novel, for Twain the real reader, the one who fully absorbs his books about robbers, pirates, and Robin Hood:

So they “went it lively,” panting and perspiring with the work. By and by Tom shouted:

“Fall! fall! Why don't you fall?”

“I shan't! Why don't you fall yourself? You're getting the worst of it.”

“Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall; that ain't the way it is in the book. The book says, ‘Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.’ You're to turn around and let me hit you in the back.”

There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the whack and fell.  (Ch. 8)

Maybe it is Tom who is the sentimental reader, the one who has sponged up all of that drivel like “upon the glad morning.”  If Mark Twain could and obviously did, why not Tom Sawyer?  Even if it is hard to attach a line like “The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy” (Ch. 14) to Sawyer, he is the one to “sat still as a stone” watching the worms, ants, and ladybugs with the focus of an entomologist, sponging it all up.

I was also surprised to see how much of the content of Huckleberry Finn was present in the final chapter of Tom Sawyer – the possibility of that book, an ethically thinner version, was already on Twain’s mind – including the sour taste that Tom would leave at the end of the later novel.  But that third person narrator, if there was any getting around the authorities he had to go, and Twain knew it.

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.

it was feared that the story was not true - Mark Twain tells the truth

Variations on my favorite Mark Twain joke – the ur-joke – all from Roughing It (1872):

This was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would “let his team out.”  He did, and if the Pacific express trains whiz through there now any faster that we did then in the stage-coach, I envy the passengers the exhilaration of it.  We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly – and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution!  I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.  (Ch. 12)

And they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil!  I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.  However I will not urge the point.  (Ch. 72)

A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye.  It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though.  It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.  [There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it.  This joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.]  (Ch. 38)

Roughing It is nominally a memoir.  Much of it is in fact a memoir, describing Twain’s life in the Nevada silver-mining country only a decade earlier.  He did, in fact, take the mail coach from St. Joseph to Carson City, Nevada; he did, in fact, visit the saline Mono Lake, which he describes in detail with some accuracy.  But everything is material for a joke, at the least, and I believe I have given here a couple of examples of the least of Twains’ jokes, which is why he urges the point while insisting that he is not. The commentary on the jokes, the insistence that they are not jokes – or that they are – is funnier than the jokes themselves.

The paradox of Twain’s travel writing is that contains a great deal of travel writing, as if Twain were a journalist producing material according to the professional standard of his time.  His travel writing as such is written much like that of many other professional writers of his time, and thus at times a little on the dull side.  His visit to the interior of an active volcano is interesting – volcanoes are interesting – but there is not much Mark Twain in it.  It is when he tires of his own account that Twain returns, as when he describes the prowess of Hawaiian divers, tells someone else’s story that perhaps goes too far, and decides he has to top it.  See above, second example.

The Stolen Elephant includes a seventy page account of a pleasure trip to Bermuda (“Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”) that kills off close to half of its pages with the trip to the island, including a recurring joke about a young man “(who, by a sort of kindly common consent, had come latterly to be referred to as ‘the Ass’)” who does not understand humor.  The final ten pages have nothing to do with Bermuda at all, but contain “The Invalid’s Story,” a tasteless, overly long, and funny story about nitwits mistaking Limburger cheese for a rotting corpse.  A footnote reads “Left out of these ‘Rambling Notes, when originally published in the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ because it was feared that the story was not true, and at that time there was no way of proving that it was not. – M. T.”

There we go, that is Mark Twain.

a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch - Twain gets odd

I made a note on a three page Twain story, “My Watch – An Instructive Little Tale” (1870), that I thought could not be right: “Superb – like Kafka or Walser or Landolfi or Aira.”  Has anybody who wanders by here read Tommaso Landolfi?  He wrote a story where Nikolai Gogol marries a balloon woman.  He had a strange imagination.  So did Twain.  His strangeness is not always visible, maybe rarely visible, and is always concealed behind his jokes and his voice.

I could see it in “My Watch.”  Twain accidentally lets his new watch run down. He “stepped into the chief jeweller’s to set it by the exact time,” but is pulled into a minor repair.

I tried to stop him – tried to make him understand that the watch kept perfect time.  But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish and beseeched him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed.

So the watch runs fast, is repaired again, runs slow, is repaired, runs alternately slows and fast, etc.  Each repair is more elaborate and damaging than the next.  The ending is the usual Twain humor column tall tale sort of thing.

The great conceit is nowhere above, but rather in the effect the watch has on its owner.  His life always moves at the pace of the watch.  When it runs fast, “[i]t hurried up house-rent, bills payable, and such things”; when slow “I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner.”  The watch becomes increasingly surreal – I mean like something in a dream sequence: “everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch.”  So those are the two pieces, human time matched to the watch and the watch's surreal independence, that move Twain into rarer imaginative company.

Or I am just noting a story where Twain uses technology as the source of jokes.  Many of the tales that look especially strange to me have a conceit built around technology.  The original 1875 Sketches, New and Old has, you will note, illustrations.  In “Political Economy,” the technology is the lightning rod (see illustration).  The comic conceit of the piece is entirely unrelated (see title, and also jokes about a writer interrupted by a salesman).

The idea is to push the effects of the technology too far, which is the place where some interesting imaginative effects can occur.  Not always, though, as in “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” an overly elaborate story of a romance that occurs entirely over the telephone, invented only a few years earlier, with the man in Maine and the woman in San Francisco – they even marry over the phone –  and here the conceit that maybe does not work is that Twain does not mention the telephone at all for fifteen pages from the end, but rather has Alonzo set his watch for three pages to let the reader know either that he is insane or that the person he is speaking too is in a different time zone.  I had to go to the Stolen White Elephant collection to find this curiosity that reaches for a parable of higher interest but keeps getting tangled in its own wires.  Still pretty odd, if not odd like Tommaso Landolfi.