I found Garrison Keillor reviewing the ‘new’ autobiography of Mark Twain.

Incredible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/books/review/Keillor-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=me

Here is a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers — you’d like to be remembered for “The Innocents Abroad” and “Life on the Mississippi” and the first two-thirds of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and not for excruciating passages of hero worship of General Grant and his son Fred and accounts of your proximity to the general and your business dealings as the publisher of his memoirs, which only reminds the reader that the general wrote a classic autobiography, and you tried to and could not

Ooooooooooooooh, now that hurts. Hahahahahahahah

We must recall that Ulysses S. Grant wrote one of the greatest autobiographies of all time and Twain’s many attempts never quite measured up.

Twain’s ‘books’ that we all grew up with became the ‘cornerstone’ (?) of American writing according to anyone from Hemmingway to Faulkner.

The reason I think that these impersonations of Twain work on the modern stage (as in Hal Holbrook) is because they are cheap to do and because I think Twain was the first ‘modern day’ stand up comic. George Carlin was a dark mini-Twain to my ears anyway. Carlin would do seven or eight pages he says, light up a joint and then edit.

Twain had to write ever day. And it sold.  Now if we see Twain as a journalist first, you can understand how he picked up this habit. Stephen King calls any writer who only produces a book every few years lazy. King even gets mad just thinking about it.

Twain had to fight for a living. Like many writers going back over the last five hundred and fifty years, he began as a typesetter in his brother’s print shop.  By the late forties he was writing his own articles. I mean, the instrumentality was right at his disposal and he had to read several different prose styles every single day.

I wonder how many of today’s teens reading and writing on their lap tops will become our greatest novelists?

While people like me worship Twain, Keillor who also has the stand up comic persona as well as a great talent, treats him as a human being which makes his little NYT essay all the more interesting.

Keillor quotes:

“Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. . . . Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.”

Is it his style or the wonderous history or the coincidence and conflagrance of these two characters that just enamors me by this paragraph?

Not many folks read Stowe anymore. Everybody my age read or reads Twain. And here Twain presents an aspect of Stowe I never would have imagined.

The famous man is in Berlin, hobnobbing with aristocracy at dinner at the ambassador’s, and meets a count: “This nobleman was of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get a chance to work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual

Pulling your ancestor out of their graves by the ears, I mean what a line. Ha

Of all the cruel deaths in the book — the death of Sam’s father just when prosperity seemed to be in his grasp; the death of his younger brother, Henry, when boilers burst on a steamboat in 1858 (Henry, who had taken a job on the boat at Sam’s urging); the death of the infant son Langdon Clemens, for which Sam felt responsible — the death of the beloved daughter far beyond her father’s love and care is a disaster from which there is no recovery. Boyishness cannot prevail, nor irreverence. The story can’t be written. The man buttons up his clothes and resigns himself to the inexpressible.

Keillor’s ‘attack of sorts’ on the premier American author brought me back to an old essay of Clemens lambasting James Fennimore Cooper.

Now a little background to this critique. Mark Twain, regardless of his use of the word ‘n&^%&er’, is known for one of the biggest slams against the Confederacy after Harriet Beecher Stowe; namely Huckleberry Finn. The man defended the Black man throughout his works. I mean you can find a sentence or paragraph here and there that makes him look like a thoroughly racist prick but you can do the same thing with the Lincoln papers.

So I am an avid defender of Twain in that respect.

But the man hated the Native American. He just hated him. And I think that had to do with personal experiences he had in the West during his reporting days. I think it had to do with first hand experiences of coming across the dead bodies of pioneers; whatever.

But the man hated the Native American.

So even the subject matter of the Deerslayer would have driven this man up the wall in rage.

The Deerslayer fanaticizes about the man of nature, the lost tribal survivor, the American Indian. So right away, the great American Novelist hates the story line.

But Twain sticks to style, at least most of the time, as he attacks Cooper:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "Deerslayer" tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the "Deerslayer" tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the "Deerslayer" tale.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the "Deerslayer" tale, this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html

Now these rules are taught, in one form or another, in every single public school in the land even if there is no attribution to the great American Novelist.

I mean: say what you are proposing to say and not just come near it. Hahahahaha

And I do not have enough space to discuss where and when Twain had broken every single one of these rules in this little essay. I pull out this essay every year and go over his rules. This is truly a funny piece whether you like Fennimore or not.

His essay reminds me of an essay by Robert Graves on Sir Thomas Malory that I found in an introduction to a translation of Malory. That is actually the point of this silly paper.

Pitched battles, even in Le Morte d’Arthur are always so vaguely described that no strategic or tactical system can be deduced from the, except a customary concealment of reserves under the shade of trees. We are told only how this knight or that knight unhorsed his opponent, or helped a fallen comrade to remount. After a welter of conventional language—feinting and fointing and sore strokes—comes a parenthetical ‘five thousand were slain’ and as in Homers Iliad, where chariotry ruled the battlefield, no mention can be found of the base-born fighter. Malory eschews realistic detail. All villages and cities are fair, all towers strong, all abbeys white stoned, all chapels little Nor are even the principal characters defined physically. We learn nothing of King Arthur but that he had grey eyes or of Sir Launcelot and Sir Tristram but they were big men. Though certain ladies may be passing fair their faces, figures and coloring cannot be guessed……

Basically Malory as well as Homer (to some extent) violates Twain’s 19 rules of writing etiquette. Ha

I wish to make a statement here that might piss people off. Graves to me had three times the intelligence and knowledge and writing skill and knowledge of language (s) as Twain.

Twain was well read of course. And he took the American dialogue to new heights. But Faulkner started with Twain and ended up the American Joyce.

To me, Twain is the soul of America, warts and all.

Graves’ point in this introduction to Malory is not to diss him as they might say today.

The fact is that late medieval English prose style was based on amplification—the embroidering of a simple statement to the point where it almost ceased to make sense—and on the practice of lulling the ear with hypnotic rhythms. The story was regarded as of lesser importance.

I tell ya, when you read the original Malory—and there are basically two originals—there is nothing in the world as wonderful as when Arthur faces the giant of Mt. Michael and cleaves the ogre’s gennytrotters asunder. Hahahahah

We read different authors because they were published; on purpose or accidently. We read different authors because textbooks and teachers tell us to. We read authors because friends we trust advise us to read them.

In the end, it is the hypnotic rhythms I think that we keep searching for.