MARK TWAIN FORUM BOOK REVIEWS: “A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court” edited by Miki Pfeffer
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In the past two years, Ms. Pfeffer has had a number of welcome interactions with CMTS, including:
- A “Trouble Begins lecture entitled “Getting to Know Mark Twain through the Eyes of Grace King, a Southern Woman of Letters” (October 2018). Her talk can be found here.
- An essay about her recent publication on Grace King. Her essay can be found here.
A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court: Letters from Grace King’s New England Sojourns. Edited by Miki Pfeffer. Foreword by Steve Courtney. Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. Hardcover $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-6973-5 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-0-8071-7281-0 (pdf). ISBN 978-0-8071-7282-7 (ebook).
Few readers expect a page-turner when they open a volume of collected letters, or tremble with anticipation at the thought of being drawn into an irresistible epistolary novel, even if the volume includes Mark Twain letters. Some previous collections of Twain’s letters–his correspondence with Howells and Twichell, for example–are certainly compelling and rewarding reading, but they don’t quite rise to the level of the drama of a novel, or inspire sustained page-turning. But thanks to the able editing of Miki Pfeffer, Grace King’s correspondence with various members of the Clemens family does indeed have the feel of an epistolary novel, and there are moments when page-turning is compulsory. This is true even though just a handful of the letters are to or from Twain himself. These letters shed new light on the daily lives of the Clemens family and their Hartford neighbors, and even those Twainians familiar with Mark Twain’s Hartford social circle through previous books like Kenneth Andrews’s Nook Farm (1950), Steve Courtney’s biography of Joe Twichell (2008), or Mark Twain’s own account in A Family Sketch (2014) will gain new insights and find themselves at times eagerly turning pages.
Grace King (1852-1932) had not yet established herself as a writer when she first met the Clemenses during a visit to Hartford in 1887. King’s family lost their fortune during the Civil War, and like many such families struggled to maintain their social standing despite their loss of wealth. King’s way of coping was to earn her way in the world by becoming a writer, and Twain’s Nook Farm neighbor and coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, took her under his wing, prompting that 1887 visit. King and the Clemenses liked each other immediately, and King’s own experiences made her sympathetic to the Clemenses a few years later when their economic status suddenly changed. King had family dramas of her own to deal with, including an alcoholic brother who eventually committed suicide and a supposedly “sickly” sister who would outlive everyone else in the family. King was shrewd, an astute observer, and was well-versed in the social graces and soon enjoyed the hospitality and trust of the Warners, Clemenses, and others. She stayed for a month with the Clemenses in 1888, spent a few weeks with them in Florence in 1892, and corresponded with Olivia Clemens and her three daughters. She less often corresponded with Twain himself, but spent hours in conversation with him and observed him first-hand as a father and story-teller. All three Clemens daughters took her into their confidences, treating her like a big sister. Olivia Clemens wrote her intimate letters, prompting King to offer advice based upon her own similar experiences. King also wrote to her family about her interactions with the Clemenses and their Hartford friends, and her letters routinely include her unguarded comments on dinner parties, fashion, shopping, manners, literature, games, jokes, religion, politics, and juicy gossip.
The story told in King’s letters provides the page-turning moments, but King’s own turns-of-phrase, descriptive skills, and wry wit carry the story along in between. Her letters are further enhanced by being lightly and clearly edited. The texts of the letters between King and Twain are printed in full, but extraneous matter is appropriately deleted from some of the letters between King and her own family, preserving the narrative flow, and keeping the focus on “Mark Twain’s court.” A few small errors creep in among the footnotes. The birth and death dates for Lillian Gillette Foote (1874-1948) seem to be in error (51.n.10), and should probably read (1860-1932). One footnote (241.n.33) identifies Susan and Theodore Crane as the aunt and uncle who cared for Susy Clemens in 1896, but Susan’s husband had died in 1889. The presence of these trivial errors are more a testament to the overall excellent editing than flaws.
King’s acerbic wit emerges most often when she describes Hartford society. The young King was awed by Hartford’s wealth and social life, but that did not blind her from a clear-eyed view of what lay before her. During her 1887 visit she notes that people there “seem to know all about literary people and the names of books” but apparently do not read books (45-46). Oscar Wilde would not publish his famous quip about a cynic knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing for another five years. She also comments that Hartfordians “have the contented expression of face and speech of souls assured of salvation in the next life and prosperity in this” (47), echoing Twain’s famous comment on the “serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.” It can be no wonder that Twain liked Grace King; she was irritated by the “uncritical” attitude of Hartford society and noticed that those who had been to Europe were still “provincial in every respect” (77). Apparently, travel was not always fatal to prejudice, as Twain claimed. When in Paris herself, King (who was fluent in French) recorded with amusement that she understood French in Paris better than she understood English in London. Twain’s own observations on the awful German language and French translations of his own works come to mind. But her sharpest comments are for the “dried up uninteresting” girls at Smith College “with not the slightest eruption of chest development.” King concludes that “if ever I had daughters to educate they should be educated not to make a living, but to make a man make a living for them” (57). She found Smith girls to be “all ugly uninteresting girls” who were being “trained into science and homeliness” and reported that one girl had drowned herself in the river the previous week, saying “I am not surprised–only I would have loved to drown some of the others too, if I had been she” (143).
Of course, Twainians will be most interested in King’s reports on Twain’s behavior and conversation, and she does not disappoint. In her journal King gives a good idea of what it was like to talk with Twain, saying he was an attentive listener and quick to catch your idea, that he did not impose his own ideas, that he was “delightfully unpremeditated” in the way he worked his stories into a conversation, that he was frank and autobiographical, and that he treated a woman in conversation the same as he treated a man, and in this way put you at ease (xii). She describes Twain’s mocking impersonation of George W. Cable (223), describes Twain’s story-telling as “the greatest circus I was ever at” (42), witnesses Twain’s readings of Browning (42), and captures some amusing episodes, including one when she and the Clemenses and Warners were traveling together and entered a very hot train car. The women immediately opened the windows to cool off and this disturbed Twain who had curled up in a corner to read. She reports Twain grumbling “If a lot of women were sent to hell the first thing they would want to do would be to open the windows” (38). King was not only a recorder of Twain’s words and deeds, but she may have served as a model for some of his writings. When King was preparing to visit with the Clemenses in 1888, at a time when Twain was avoiding visitors while working on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Olivia wrote to King encouraging her visit, quoting her husband who said that he did not consider King “a mar to my work but an inspiration” (100).
As mentioned before, some page-turning moments come when Olivia Clemens shares with King her innermost thoughts after the death of Susy…….
…….Finish reading Kevin Mac Donnell’s review at the Mark Twain Forum
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An irksome puzzle has persisted through more than a century of Mark Twain scholarship. It has usually been avoided altogether, or at best it has been briefly touched upon by a handful of scholars. In her ground-breaking new study, Kerry Driscoll spells it out clearly: “While Twain’s view on blacks . . . [demonstrate] unequivocal growth away from the racism of his origins in the antebellum South, his representations of Indians do not follow a similarly redemptive arc. They are instead vexingly erratic and paradoxical, commingling antipathy and sympathy, fascination and visceral repugnance” (4). Driscoll credits scholars who have dealt briefly with Twain’s attitude toward America’s indigenous people–Ned Blackhawk, Louis J. Budd, Joseph Coulombe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Foner, Max Geismer, Harold J. Kolb, and Jeffrey Steinbrink–and points out that they tend to fall into two camps that either idealize or vilify Native Americans. Both camps distort Twain’s own views by over-simplifying the issue. The truth is more complicated, and a book length study to explore these complications is long overdue.
Hardly a season passes without another Twain’t springing up from the fertile soil tilled so long ago by Mark Twain. His influence seems everlasting, and his writings, biography, and cultural iconography continue to inspire bountiful crops of works based upon his writings–borrowing characters, titles, or plots–or stories featuring Twain himself as a character. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has inspired attempts to write sequels (beginning with Twain’s own efforts), modern day adaptations, pastiches, stage and musical and movie versions, and even comic books, graphic novels, and one robotic version. These Twain’ts (they ain’t Twain; hence they are Twain’ts) have sometimes taken successful innovative directions, like Jon Clinch’s masterful Finn (2007), that provided a startling dark counterpoint to the original novel, illuminating the character of Pap Finn and shedding light on Huck’s maternity, or Tim Champlin’s recent time-traveling romps for young readers that insert modern characters into reimagined adventures of Huck, Tom, and Becky. Some Twain’ts succeed and some fail, and the vast majority fall somewhere in between, so the arrival of a successful Twain’t is cause for notice.
Mark Twain was a man of the waters. His nom de plume signifies two fathoms–safe water when navigating out of the shallows–dangerous water under other circumstances. He spent his boyhood just a few blocks from a steamboat landing, dreamed of becoming a steamboat pilot (or else a pirate) and realized that dream for a time. He lost childhood friends to drownings and lost a beloved brother in a steamboat accident. His first piece of writing to be published in a nationally recognized publication was about a disaster at sea, his first best-selling book was the result of a four months voyage with stops on several continents, and his literary masterpiece takes place on the dangerous waters and shores of the Mississippi River. When his second daughter died (in water) and he was suffering from late stage congestive heart failure (edema), he lit out for the island of Bermuda for his last months of life, and when Paine was bringing him home to die he begged for a fatal dose of morphine to end his life while at sea.
Huck Finn’s name signifies an insignificant (huckleberry) Irish child (Finn). The stereotypical Irishman of the nineteenth century was a drunkard and thief, and Irish immigrants frequently were met by signs in shop windows reading “No Irish Need Apply.” Although Irish women could get jobs as housekeepers, Irish males were more often hired as day laborers and rarely hired as butlers or allowed to work in a home; African-American males were more often hired as house-servants than Irish-American males. If African-Americans occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder during and after slavery, Irish-Americans, who flooded into the country in the 1840s to escape the cruelties of British rule and forced starvation (not famine), were only one rung up the ladder – which bred resentment and racism. Huck was the son of Pap Finn, the town drunk, an Irishman who need not apply, nor should his son.
“It’s lovely to live on a raft” says Huck just a few paragraphs into chapter 19 of Mark Twain’s masterpiece. But what kind of raft is it lovely to live on, and does it even matter what kind of raft Huck lived on? Of course, everyone who has read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn knows that the raft that transported Huck and Jim into literary immortality was a tiny affair consisting of a few short logs tied together with barely enough room to hold the two of them. Proof of this can be found on the covers of many modern paperback editions of the book. But looking at more covers it becomes obvious that their tiny raft was made of logs with a plank deck on top, and a wigwam. Of course, anyone who has studied the one dozen illustrations in the first edition of the book (found in chapters 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 24, 29, and 40) knows that their raft was in fact made of planks and had a wigwam and a long steering oar, but nowhere in the book does an illustration depict the entire raft, so even a careful study of E. W. Kemble’s drawings does not tell the whole story. Finally, anyone who has read the text carefully, knows that Huck gives a fuller description of their raft, declaring that it measured twelve feet by fifteen or sixteen feet, and that it was made of pine planks that had broken off of a much larger lumber raft, and that it sat a good six or seven inches out of the water, and had one long oar. They also know that Jim had to fashion a second steering oar to control their not-so-tiny raft, make a raised platform of dirt upon which to build a fire, and build a wigwam large enough to accommodate that fire. They also know that the raft later had room for the Duke and the King. These astute readers think they know more than those readers who misplaced their trust in those modern paperback covers, but even astute readers don’t know the half of it.