Book Reviews

THE REST IS CHEATING Was Mark Twain the ‘poet of the Mississippi’or a ‘rock star ahead of his time’? Christopher Martin decides

This is the second biography of Mark Twain written by Ron Powers, a writer well-regarded for his television criticism who, understandably, has produced a portrait of the Victorian humorist, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, for the TV and rock’n’roll age. Twain was an autodidact. Early on he sampled a wide range of literature from the McGuffey’s Reader, which also led him to an appreciation of the Bible, familiarity with which became ‘a cornerstone of his intellectual edifice’. Powers recounts: ‘He read all the time, his choices as eclectic and humanistic as his narratives would prove to be.’ Twain relished language. In Powers’ view, Twain was a ‘passionate amateur scholar of language’, not literature, though he eventually produced ‘excellent if unorthodox literary criticism’. His three greatest books, The Innocents Abroad (1869), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884), are full-length novels, but some

of his best work is also found in his short stories. ‘He valued brevity’ and helped to purge ‘American literary English of its heavy Victorian ornamentation’. Famously, Twain ‘adored aphorisms and built them throughout his life. Any language, to him, was a form of music.’ Twain is remembered as a poet of the Mississippi, the mighty river he got to know well working as a riverboat pilot. He ran a

Clara, Livy, and Sam photographed in 1900 (below). The figure known throughout the world as Mark Twain relaxes with his great literary friend and champion William Dean Howells in 1909, a year before his death (below left).

TitleMark Twain: A Lifeby Ron Powers

Price£25

Publisher Simon and Schuster

ISBN0743285794

couple of boats aground. He picked up his pen-name from the pilot’s call for ‘Mark Two’, and travelled on many other boats around the world, one voyage in the company of pilgrims to the Holy Land, resulting in a burlesque account of the trip in The Innocents Abroad. ‘Like most of his books,’ says Powers, ‘Innocentsis a grab bag of abrupt digression.’ Much of the material in that book was based on his journalistic

negro woman in Pudd’nhead Wilson(1894), who is Twain’s ‘first fully believable female character’. As Powers underlines, ‘Twain democratised the national voice by availing it of vernacular…’ When Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, writing as ‘Nym Crinkle’, reviewed Twain’s play The Gilded Age(adapted from his and Charles Dudley Warner’s Washingtonnovel), he may well have put his finger on Twain’s weakness as a writer: ‘The want of constructive art’. Or, asks Powers, ‘was it a weakness? The serendipity in Mark Twain’s narratives might be explained by his lack of formal training in rhetoric and composition. Or it might be explained by his intuitive understanding that he didn’t need it. The question begged by

Twain’s celebrity makes him an easy figure to relate to in our time:he had fan mail,drew large crowds to hear him tell stories,and he was as familiar as any film star with his trademark drawl,moustache and mass of hair

mailings to the newspapers, and it was journalism that took him to the frontier towns of the West such as Carson City and Virginia City. He captured the vernacular speech of the Western states, and also that of black America, as in his short fiction A True Story. His friend, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who gladly gave a first critical reading to many of his manuscripts, called this ‘one of those noble pieces of humanity for which the South has atoned chiefly if not solely through him for all its spite to the Negro.’ It is Roxana, a

Crinkle’s declaration is: if he had been schooled in the formal requirements of literature, would that have suffocated the divine, anarchic spontaneity that provides the greatest pleasures in his work?’ There was something intuitive about Twain’s storytelling, which could usually stand unaided in its short form, but for the longer fictions, he would rely on writer friends such as Howells to advise him on how to improve, at least, the structure of the work, which would usually be years in gestation. His greatest achievement is

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Once Upon a Time Alastair Smartrevisits the golden age of magazine fiction

probably The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ‘Its greatness,’ affirms Powers, ‘rests on its lapidary portraiture of America as encapsulated in a time and place; on its revelatory use of vernacular American dialect as the vehicle for its story; and for the authentic passion, metaphor, self-expression, and moral reasoning released via this dialect.’ It was acclaimed by HL Mencken in 1913 as ‘a truly stupendous piece of work, perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English’. Writing some 20 years later, Ernest Hemingway averred that ‘all modern American literature comes from’ it, but he also cautioned: ‘If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is cheating.’ Twain’s celebrity makes him a figure easy to relate to in our time: he had fan mail, to the extent that he had to hire a secretary he could dictate replies to, he drew large crowds to hear him entertain with his stories, and he was as familiar as any film star with his trademark drawl, moustache and mass of hair. Following in the footsteps of Dickens, he lectured around the world, which eventually became a necessity. He had had family illnesses to deal with, and he made a series of bad business investments, which included a typesetting machine, and publishing. He did publish one successful book, the memoirs of Ulysses S Grant, whom he admired both as military leader and president. Twain emerges not just as a humorist and writer, often fuelled by anger and even vindictiveness, but as a man of conscience. This is from his Mark Twain’s Notebook (published posthumously in 1935): ‘Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery.’ He expressed his anti-imperialism on many occasions, particularly in To the Person Sitting in Darkness(1901), which Powers calls ‘a landmark of socio-political satire’. In Stirring Times in Austria(1898), he filed an eyewitness account of anti-semitism. He was introduced to Helen Keller, the remarkable blind and deaf girl, and secured funds for her to continue her education. This is a rich book, embracing Twain the entertainer, as much as the man of sorrows, who suffered the early deaths of Livy and two of their daughters. Powers has Sam Clemens down as a rock star before his time, sometimes feeling trapped by his fame.

Popular fiction in Britain was at its zenith between 1880 and 1950, especially within the pages of the period’s 140 popular fiction magazines. Before movies, radio, TV and the internet were fully established as part of a Briton’s daily regimen, the printed word and the theatrical stage were the only forms of mass entertainment. And in the former’s case, it was weekly or monthly magazines, rather than sluggishly-produced books, that attracted the more readers. For instance, 300,000 people read Agatha Christie’s first two series of Poirot short stories in Sketchmagazine in 1923, while

Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in the Strandmagazine. It also catalogues the magazines in A-Z format, analysing the history, content and ethos of each in turn. Such an approach proves comprehensive, informative and ensures easily accessible nuggets of information – did you know Nashmagazine published a contribution by Benito Mussolini in November 1930? However, by eschewing a broad narrative sweep through the golden period of popular fiction magazines, Ashley passes up the opportunity to tell the history of Britain through the fiction it was reading. We are left to infer, for instance, how The War of the Worlds’ appearance in 1897 reflected concerns of foreign invasion and the endof-century advance in science and technology; and how the exotically-set stories published in wartime – such as H de Vere Stacpoole’s The Luck of Captain Slocumseries in 1915-16 – reflected a collective desire to be removed from the raging European conflict. Nevertheless, as purely a guide to the rise of popular fiction as a form of mass entertainment, The Age of the Storytellersis both engaging and unrivalled.

just 2,000 read the same stories collected into book form in 1924. With little competition for the attention of Britain’s increasingly literate urban and suburban populations, popular fiction magazines achieved a cultural hegemony that ensured mass exposure for its stories. Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves and Wooster, Father Brown, Fu Manchu, Miss Marple and Winnie-the-Pooh were among the characters – and Treasure Island, Three Men in a Boat, The Railway Childrenand The War of the Worldswere among the serialised novels – that appeared first in magazines and thereby achieved mass exposure. These characters and novels would all thus enter the nation’s consciousness, never to leave. Mike Ashley’sThe Age of the Storytellers charts the key dates for popular fiction from 1880-1950, such as December 1893 when

TitleTHE AGE OF THE STORYTELLERS – British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880-1950 Mike Ashley

Price$95

Publisher British Library/Oak Knoll Press

ISBN1-58456-170-X

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