Saturday, April 11, 2015

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.

15 comments:

  1. Ron Powers argues in his biography that Twain's writing ranges from very good to really awful. You seem to have hit upon the good up to this point. As I am poised to read more Twain, I am both looking forward to and dreading the awful. It will put everything else by Twain in perspective. I hope you will excoriate Twain when he deserves it. (I'm still smiling about lye and liars.)

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  2. i'm currently reading some james thurber. there is some connection here with twain, i think. they both in different ways experiment with turning commonplace attitude(s) inside out. looking at words or reality from the bottom up as it were. it is difficult to pinpoint exactly the perspective from which this seems humorous, but i guess that's where the genius component comes in.

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    1. The perspectives - that is a good way to look at things. The voices of comic writers are often so unique that they are impenetrable to analysis.

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  3. What does Powers say is really awful? I don't want to read the awful stuff. I want to skip it.

    A fair amount of the tales and sketches, even as selected by the Library of America editor, is down at the level of ordinary. Not so far down as awful.

    I thought I was rough but fair when describing The Gilded Age, the worst book of Twain's, or half-book, I have read.

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    1. Powers makes that general assessment in his opening paragraphs without citing titles; when I get farther into the book he will I suppose be specific. So we shall have to wait.

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  4. Twain wrote so much, and much of it he wrote so fast - there have to be some flubs somewhere.

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    1. Here is the language from Powers (page 6): "What is it about his writing--nearly all of it problematic, much of it mediocre, a healthy part of is unfinished, some of it simply awful--that continues to exercise the very scholars who expend so much energy trying to reduce him to their pet formulas and crusades?"

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    2. CORRECTION: omit "is" and change to "it" before "unfinished." Mea culpa.

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    3. I see. A prof-bashing rhetorical move. Previous scholars are idiots - formulaic crusaders; I am the one who finally gets Twain right.

      I will be shocked if you find that Powers made any serious attempt to answer that question.

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  5. maybe a stretch too far?: thurber suffered from bonnett's syndrome; hallucinations related to vision damage. is humor derived from damage of some sort? traumatic or physical? trying to correct or deal with something broken...?

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  6. Too far, I don't know. Real comedians are wired differently. It is hard not to speculate a little about how and why.

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  7. not being one to quit a subject at the drop of a..., i was considering humor as a form of problem solving; i'll be thinking about the ramifications of that for some time, probably, but i will refrain from bothering you with them. small blessings...

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  8. It could make an interesting book, I was thinking.

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  9. There seems to me to be a sort of American Comic Voice that you find in Twain and Barry and O'Rourke and even Hunter Thompson (and I might argue you also find it in swaths of W.S. Burroughs) that, you know, just doesn't send me. I've never become a Twain fan (or a "comic" writing fan) no matter how much I read. You make some good observations in these posts about Mr Twain; I'm just glad it's you and not me, brother.

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  10. Yes, and I love that voice. In earlier comments (and just above), I suggested that there ought to be a book about that voice, and then it occurred to me that I ought to write that book, which is nuts. But I would love doing the reading for that book.

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