Posts Tagged ‘Mark Twain’

“Is He Dead?”

Shelley Fisher Fishkin has scored a lot of “firsts” with Twain – we wrote about her rediscovery of a long-lost Twain play Is He Dead? some time ago here.  In a recent interview in the journal Americana here, she discusses her lifelong partnership with the author.

Her adventures began shortly after her 1988 From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America was published:

My first wild adventure with Mark Twain happened shortly before that book was published. I was infuriated by the efforts of a black educator named John Wallace to close down a production of Huck Finn at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and to take the book out of the nation’s schools, on the grounds that the novel and its author were racist. (He wanted to replace Twain’s book with his own edition of it – which, like the recent New South Books edition, replaced every use of the word “nigger” with “slave.”)

I wrote an op-ed that the New York Times published on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Huck Finn in the U.S.  I observed that Mark Twain had had to turn to satire in the first place because his direct exposés of racism (towards the Chinese in San Francisco) were censored; but now he faced the prospect of censorship once again because some readers couldn’t understand his irony.

The day that op-ed appeared in the Times, I was awakened by a phone call. A woman said, “I don’t know you, but I just read your piece in the New York Times, and I’ve got to see you right away.  I have a letter Mark Twain wrote that nobody knows about yet, and after reading your column, I know you’ll know what to do with it.  Here’s what it says.”  She read me the letter over the phone. A chill went through me as I realized that the letter contained the only direct, non-ironic condemnation of racism that we had from Twain during the period in which he published Huck Finn. Indeed, it was written the same year that Huck Finn was published.

The woman who called me was an antiques dealer who had found it in an old desk. I authenticated the letter and I researched its context single-mindedly over the next few weeks, reconstructing a story that ended up intriguing others as much as it fascinated me: Warner T. McGuinn, the young  black law student Twain wrote about in the letter,  a young man whom he would end up funding  through his own private “affirmative action” plan,  went on to become a major civil rights lawyer who was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall.  The story (which the New York Times ran on its front page) got huge national and international attention.

The discussion includes the book that made her a Twain superstar, her 1993 book Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices:

I was somewhat astonished by the ruckus it caused!  Why should people have been so surprised by the idea that black and white writers and speakers had been shaping each other’s work throughout our nation’s history? Segregated lunch counters may have disappeared in the 1960s, but segregated syllabi were still alive and well in the 1990s.  In the early 1990s, there were “American Literature” courses, which were populated almost completely by “white” writers, and there were “African-American Literature Courses” that focused on writers who were invariably “black.” My book challenged the usefulness – and accuracy – of those segregated silos. …

If I were to have the chance to write Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, again, I would do one thing differently: I would explain the title.  It was a mistake to assume that everyone would know that my title was signifying on the “one-drop rule.” Some of my critics ridiculed my argument by charging me with denying that any white voices had shaped Huck’s voice in the book, which is preposterous.  My title was simply playing with the idea that if we applied the “one-drop rule” to culture, and if Huck’s voice was shaped at least in part by black voices, then Huck was “black.” I should have said so.

When he wasn't starting forest fires, he was here.

Old friends, new friends:  Thursday’s post about reconnoitering with an old friend James Bryant, thanks to an Islamic prayerbook, fell into grateful and unfamiliar hands.

I received a pleasant note from Dwight Green, who was on his way to Monterey about the time he ran across my jottings.  He was already planning to visit the Robert Louis Stevenson house, where the author chilled while  awaiting the divorce of his wife-to-be. (“Yeah. It was complicated,” says Dwight.) I was pleased to discover that Dwight is a kindred spirit in the blogosphere: he runs the excellent blog, “A Common Reader“  – so you can read about his whole visit here.  He also points out that there’s some fascinating background about Stevenson’s stay in California here, But thanks to my heads-up, he also stopped into Carpe Diem and, given its excellent selection on California and the American West, resolved to save his pennies for the next visit.  (He also stopped into another Book Haven – no relation.)

The crowded shelves of Carpe Diem

And do yourself a favor and make a visit to this rugged stretch of the Pacific coast yourself: “The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.”

Meanwhile, what is it about famous authors and forest fires?  Are they just more careless than other people?  I wrote about Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and burnt acres on the Fourth of July here – now this from the Robert Louis Stevenson website:

While in Monterey, RLS also started a forest fire. He was fascinated by the many fires that spring up in the Californian forests and wondered whether it was the moss growing on the trees that first caught fire. The moss did catch fire – and quickly spread. RLS later described the incident in “The Old Pacific Capital” (1880).

Otherwise, I’m having a quite day, transcribing notes and revising a draft. Hope you are enjoying Bastille Day in a livelier way.

Fire and the 4th go hand in hand

Traditional 4th of July celebrations involve fireworks, campfires, sparklers, gunfire and cannons, and all sorts of other incendiary tomfoolery.  What better way to celebrate than with the tale of two inadvertent literary firebugs?

Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin apparently agrees, according to her new post on the Library of America’s “Reader’s Almanac” blog.

Here’s the story:  Through their own naïveté and carelessness, Mark Twain burned 200 acres of forest around Lake Tahoe. He failed to break Henry David Thoreau‘s earlier record of setting 300 acres of his beloved Concord woods aflame.

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote Oscar Wilde.  He might have had Twain in mind, for Twain loved Tahoe with a passion that all later lakes failed to arouse.  Italy’s famous Lake Como was as nothing.  The renowned Sea of Galilee was a downright disappointment.  (I understood this completely when I saw the mud puddle called the Jordan River.  Where was the mighty, rolling river of the spirituals?  It occurred to me as I gazed at the sluggish, fetid waters that the slaves had the Mississippi in mind.)

“Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe,” wrote the dazzled Twain in Roughing It, “would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.”

America's answer to Como, Galilee

Yet he built a campfire on the shore one autumn day in 1861 and left it unattended while he returned to his boat.  A gust of wind did the rest.

Seventeen years earlier, a stray spark from Thoreau’s campfire started a conflagration.  According to Shelley:

Both writers were struck by the “glorious spectacle” (Thoreau’s words) of the fires they had started; Twain found the “mighty roaring of the conflagration” to be “very impressive.” Neither Thoreau nor Twain showed much remorse for the destruction he had caused. “I have set fire to the forest,” Thoreau wrote in his journal six years later, “but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it.”

Twain, at least, has not been forgiven.

Said Shelley:  ”Last week I asked a firefighter at Fallen Leaf Lake, in the Tahoe Basin just south of Lake Tahoe, whether Mark Twain was still persona non grata in the area. He nodded grimly.”

Having fled my own home with suitcases and pets during two wildfires in that part of the world and stayed at home for a third close call, I can understand the firefighter’s umbrage.

Read the whole cautionary tale here.

OK, you’ve got to see this.  Susan Sontag in a bear suit.  Flavorwire has Annie Leibovitz‘s photo of her partner thus outfitted – but go to the source, which is here, for a gallery of Leibovitz’s portraits, including some magnificent ones of Sontag.

Flavorwire’s “Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers” features Sontag as Exhibit #1, but some of them are more or less unsurprising. Mark Twain playing billiards, Ernest Hemingway kick a can, Hunter Thompson with an inflatable woman, Colette dressed as a cat – but this one takes the cake: Marcel Proust playing air guitar on Boulevard Bineau with his friends in 1892 (his mimetic beloved Jeanne Pouquet in center).  At this time of the photo, he was known as a snob, a dilettante, and a social climber.

But the somehow sad image brought back the words of René Girard (recently the subject of a post here) from his landmark Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which celebrated its 50th anniversary since publication a few months ago. His words:

“The sterile oscillation between pride and shame is also found in Proustian snobbism. We shall never despise the snob as much as he despises himself. The snob is not essentially despicable; he tries to escape his own subjective feeling of contemptibility by assuming the new being which he supposedly procures through snobbism. The snob thinks he is always on the point of securing this being and behaves as if he has already done so. Thus he acts with intolerable arrogance. Snobbism is an inextricable mixture of pride and meanness, and it is this very mixture which defines metaphysical desire. …

“The snob bows before a noble title which has lost all real value, before a social prestige so esoteric that it is really appreciated by only a few elderly ladies. … The snob seeks no concrete advantage; his pleasures and sufferings are purely metaphysical.”

The anonymous photo is from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which, incidentally, also has the René Girard archive.

My peregrinations around the internet led me to this charming footage of Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison at the author’s estate in Stormfield, Conn., in 1909 – one of the many wonders of youtube. Twain is shown walking around his home and playing cards with his daughters Clara and Jean. The flickering is caused by film deterioration.  This is the only known footage of the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is, of course, a “silent.”

A long day and a late night – more later.  I’d be curious, however, to hear what Twain expert and friend Shelley Fisher Fishkin thinks of this short film, 1 minute and 48 seconds long.

Liz Taylor and Joan Fontaine: 'scuse me, who's the heroine here?

Some time ago, we launched a firestorm about the controversial new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that eliminates the “n” word altogether.

Now Sir Walter Scott‘s Ivanhoe is taking a thumping.  Apparently, modern readers find the 1819 novel, set in 12th century England, too ponderous and verbose.

According to an article in the Telegraph, a Scottish professor, David Purdie, has solved the problem with a pair of scissors:  he spent 18 months snipping it from 179,000 words to a mere 80,000:

While Prof. Purdie has retained the antiquated writing style used by Sir Walter, he has taken out the swathes of punctuation which extend the novel.

He said: “Very few people read Scott these days because he’s long and wordy and difficult for the modern ear and modern attention span.

“In the early 19th century, a comma was placed after every phrase, which makes it tedious reading.

Eliminating commas, however, does not account for cutting it down to less than half.  Last time I checked, commas didn’t count as words.

Some have questioned whether the book is so close to death that it needed this kind of life-saving surgery. Said, Professor David Hewit of Aberdeen University,  “The idea that Scott is neglected, no, it’s not neglected at all,” he said. “Ivanhoe is being well read.” He said that Penguin editions for the book had sold around 100,000 copies in the last decade, with worldwide sales of around 200,000 copies.

Moreover famous fans of Ivanhoe include Tony Blair, who said it he would take it to a desert island with him, and Ho Chi Minh, who praised medieval gallantry shown in the novel, as channeled by the Victorians.

Purdie appeared to have found an unexpected champion over at Billevesées. Blogger William V. Madison wrote about the novel earlier this month:

The plot that thrilled generations of readers is in constant struggle with Scott’s prose, which is verbose in the extreme. A character may typically take a long paragraph just to tell another to make haste, and my second-hand paperback edition provided very few notes (mostly Scott’s own, along with a thin glossary) to explain obscure terminology. (No attempt was made to explain the constant misuse of participles for past tense: “He sprung forth,” e.g.) Scott lards the story with “poetic” descriptions and song lyrics, and toward the end of the book, when poor Rebecca awaits her doom, Scott meanders off for several scarcely relevant chapters, sabotaging his own suspense. The resolution of the plot, hitherto relatively plausible, depends on one improbable death and an even more outlandish resurrection.

However – surprise! – Madison changes his tune:

In short, modern readers will find the odds stacked against them. And yet the damned thing does work. Almost against my will, I found myself caught up in the story, and this is largely due to Scott’s characterization, which in a couple of cases — notably the Jews, Isaac of York and his daughter — proves quite compelling. We feel so strongly the injustices they suffer that we care about what happens to them.

So much so that Scott complained after the novel was published why Ivanhoe didn’t elope with the Jewish Rebecca, rather than the boring shiksa Rowena.  That was even before the MGM movie that put a luscious Elizabeth Taylor in the supporting role.

It’s a fun read – Madison, I mean, not Ivanhoe (which I managed to read and enjoy as a teenager without too much trouble) – check out the whole thing here.  Madison even answers the eternal question why the evil Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert doesn’t ravish Rebecca, as he had originally planned. It’s included in a long-lost fragment of the novel here.

Postscript on 1/31:  A belated hat tip to Kevin Rossiter for the Telegraph article.  He put his own p.o.v. succinctly:  “I just object to the idea of making any work of literature ‘more accessible.’  Peter Brown gave a lecture at Stanford a couple of years ago and addressed the question, ‘Why would anyone want want to study late antiquity?’  He used a phrase I like a lot – he said late antiquity had a ‘salutary strangeness.’  I think that’s what great literary works often have, too.  A healthy departure from the unexamined and comfortable.”  See more on Peter Brown of Princeton’s lecture here.

Earlier today, a friend mentioned that Mark Twain once said something like, “The easiest way to be recognized as a leader is to find a parade and get in front of it.”  I can’t find the quote anywhere — but as Ken Kesey said, I’m sure it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.

And it’s especially fitting in a day the Book Haven achieved a brief flicker of fame via Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “Brainstorm” blog here. He retraced our steps in the Huck Finn and the n-word kerfuffle — “as far as I know, the controversy began with a blog post by Cynthia Haven here” — and then follows the twists and turns through Sam Gwynn‘s concerns and Alan Gribben‘s explanations to conclude masterfully:

Haven’s selections are illuminating, for in Gribben’s and Gwynn’s explanations the whole problem crystallizes. When Gwynn puts the n-word in CAPS, he registers its force, which explains why he feels justified in deleting it.  This is, however, to give the term a moral meaning that it does not deserve. Yes, the n-word has moral meaning, but in the classroom it should be circumscribed by its historical existence. To grant it so much power today, at this moment, is to be captive to the power it possessed in 1884 and in 1950.

Likewise, when Gribben terms the n-word ”now-indefensible,” he assumes a moral stance toward it that is misdirected. No teacher should approach the language in a book written more than 100 years ago as in a condition of defensible or indefensible. Assigning a work is not the same thing as endorsing it. It is to hold the work up to analysis.  Furthermore, one of the lessons of the assignment should be to recognize that one can analyze something that one deplores. Simply deploring it is not enough, we should tell our students. The deletion of the n-word in the novel does the opposite, teaching students to consult their sensitivities more than their intellects.  Thanks, Cynthia, for bringing the action into the light.

And thank you, Mark, for framing the history so succinctly and the issues so thoughtfully.  We now return to our accustomed obscurity.

She has spoken.

Michiko Kakutani adds her two cents on the n-word debate in the New York Times today:

Mr. Gribben’s effort to update Huckleberry Finn (published in an edition with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by NewSouth Books), like Mr. Foley’s assertion that it’s an old book and “we’re ready for new,” ratifies the narcissistic contemporary belief that art should be inoffensive and accessible; that books, plays and poetry from other times and places should somehow be made to conform to today’s democratic ideals. It’s like the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.

Radford's mini-bowdlerization

Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books — the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned. …

Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of “The Merchant of Venice” (starring Al Pacino) revised the play to elide potentially offensive material, serving up a nicer, more sympathetic Shylock and blunting tough questions about anti-Semitism. More absurdly, a British theater company in 2002 changed the title of its production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to “The Bellringer of Notre Dame.” … According to Noel Perrin’s 1969 book, “Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America,” Victorians explained their distaste for the colorful, earthy works of 18th-century writers like Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding by invoking the principle of “moral progress” and their own ethical superiority: “People in the 18th century, and earlier, didn’t take offense at coarse passages, because they were coarse themselves.”

So much new news on the n-word firestorm, it’s hard to know where to begin.

First of all, NewSouth has published excerpts of Alan Gribbens‘s introduction to the new “n-less” edition of Mark Twain‘s Huckleberry Finn.  Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes attacks the new introduction as gutless here.

Over at Books Inq., Chris Matarazzo of the Hats and Rabbits blog comments:  “The ‘visible sense of relief” the editor ‘sensed’ during lectures as a result of his having substituted in the word ‘slave’ is seen by him as an indication that the substitution was a good idea. I would argue that it better indicates that it was a bad idea.”

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a spread on the controversy, with 11 opinions.

Douglass: Not a wimp by a longshot

Among them, Mark Bauerlein began with a classroom anecdote while he was teaching Frederick Douglass‘s autobiographical works.  One student was offended, and dropped the class.

What would Douglass think of a man who closed his book because of that word? “I’ve been torn from my mother, beaten regularly, and I’ve witnessed rape and murder,” he might say. “You can’t take the ordinary label of the day?”

Most of all, Douglass understood that dignity can endure even at the bottom of a slave society no matter the abuse. Twain did, too, showing that in spite of all the cruelty and the racial epithets, Jim remains the noble figure in the novel. Take away the insult and we lose the full measure of his character.

Worse, Alan Gribben’s hesitation over the the epithet has a terrible effect, producing the anti-intellectual attitude of many students. “I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’” Gribben has said.

Stop being so fussy. Political correctness is bad tutelage, validating thin skins and selective inquiries. The more students read sanitized materials in high school, the more they enter college inclined to dispel things they don’t want to hear.

Facebook keeps urging me to “friend” Francine Prose but when I try, I get standardized rejections that she has too many friend requests already — so I’m glad to see with all that socializing that she has time to think about Huck. She  has a different concern:  “… what puzzles me most about the debate — I’m not trying to sound willfully naïve — is why the word “nigger” should be more freighted, more troubling, the cause of more (to paraphrase the edition’s introduction) ‘resentment’ than the word ‘slave.’ Racial epithets are inarguably disgusting, but not nearly so disgusting as an institution that treats human beings as property to be beaten, bought and sold. ‘Nigger’ and ‘slave’ are not synonyms by any stretch of the imagination. Jim’s problem is not that he is called a ‘nigger’ but that he is chattel who can be freed or returned to his master.”  She concludes:

Knowing the history of censorship in our libraries, knowing how often Huck Finn has been removed from a school’s curriculum because of the word “nigger,” I’m almost inclined to say that if it takes censorship to insure that the book is still widely read, it might not be the worst thing. Let students experience Huck’s consciousness and discover the cruel realities that his culture took for granted. After that they may be inspired to read what Mark Twain actually wrote.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is inevitably included in the roundup, and uses “Papp Finn’s rant,” which she quotes in full, n-word and all, to make her point:

Racism is ugly. The history and legacies of American racism are our nation’s own peculiar brand of ugly — and the n-word embodies it.

To understand how racism works in America it is necessary to understand how this word has been used to inflict pain on black people, challenge their humanity, and undercut their achievements. Leading black writers in America from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison have understood this: to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how racists sound in all their offensive ugliness. …

It is the persistence of racism in America that makes the n-word in Huck Finn a problem in the classroom. We need to give teachers the tools they need to teach Twain’s book in the context of the history of racism in this country that is its central concern.

Over at Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes, Mark concludes:

Unquestionably, Twain’s text presents a serious problem for teachers: Cynthia Haven, who first brought word of the NewSouth book, has heard from professors sharing their reservations about discussing the book. But the book doesn’t fix the problem so much as it identifies a market niche: People who think that this book will fix the problem. Twain might have appreciated this kind of ruckus: When he learned that the Concord Public Library had banned Huckleberry Finn from its shelves shortly after the novel was published in 1885, he wrote, “That will sell 25,000 copies, sure.” But would he have any patience for the sanctimony surrounding this version of book—the very sanctimony Huckleberry Finn skewers?

“New Huckleberry Finn Edited for Language” at The Onion here.

And Sharon Heinz sent us this:

Twain

The latest round of the n-word controversy started with NYC Councilman Charles Barron’s suggestion that Huckleberry Finn be banned from schools, as we discussed in our Dec. 30 report about Shelley Fisher Fishkin‘s editorial in the New York Daily News on that topic.  Perhaps it will end, now, with Shelley’s revamped editorial, reconfigured to discuss the the publication of Alan Gribben‘s edition of Huckleberry Finn with NewSouth.  The link is published on the Daily News‘ homepage today.

An excerpt from “Take the n-word out of ‘Huck Finn’? It’s an insult to Mark Twain – and to American history“:

Fishkin (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“Sanitizing the language which aided and abetted white America’s denial of the humanity of black Americans from the nation’s founding doesn’t change that history. It papers it over and allows us to dodge its rawness.

Facing that history in all its offensiveness is crucial to understanding it and transcending it, and literature is uniquely positioned to help us do that. …

For to expose a racist society for what it is, you have to show racists as they are, speaking as they would speak.”

You know, if I were a publisher looking to defend this new, n-free version of Huck Finn, I’d send a couple of enterprising interns to the library, and to Google, to research and catalog the history of adaptations of the novel. I suspect there’s a long history of retellings–comic books, kids’ books, cartoons, etc.–that sanitize the language in much the same way. The publisher might at least have been ready to argue from precedent.

Sypeck

That said, I was pleased to find a 1985 interview with (the great) Roger Miller about his musical adaptation, Big River, and the necessary use of That Word. “I hate to even say it, it’s so far from my spirit,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “but we have to use it because it’s in the novel. Huck is a young boy who, being a kid, doesn’t have all those prejudiced feelings and, being a kid, he hears the grown-ups say all this stuff that he hasn’t grown into yet. So the book shows the innocence of youth and the wisdom of the black man, and it makes for a great friendship. They become like two fiddles that play together. I never got a chance to write about things like that in my music business.”

Interestingly, when Big River was staged in Utah earlier this year, the producers got permission to eliminate half of the uses of That Word, but they were proud enough of keeping the other half in the script that the director could say, “You don’t make apologies for it”!