Twain on the Brain

When I was growing up you couldn’t get away from Mark Twain, from the vintage card game ‘Authors’ to the 1970 animated TV movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to the 1968 New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the 1973 Reader’s Digest musical Tom Sawyer. Cheap hardcover editions of both Sawyer and Finn abounded at retail stores. They were seen as an easy introduction to classic American literature for the kiddies, embodying Romance (in both senses of the word) and Picaresque Adventure.

Then came the disillusionments of the Watergate Scandal and the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the American idea went into an eclipse. While never being de-throned from his position among literary circles, he became more problematic in social and pop cultural spheres. The ‘rancid’ and bitter aspects of Twain were emphasized to keep him more relatable and relevant, while his 219-time use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn made his promotion as a ‘children’s author’ controversial to say the least.

David Fleming, our Creative Writing teacher in high school, was a huge proponent of his works, but I remember even then that the marginalization of Twain (and of the Western Canon) seemed to have begun. It all appears to have culminated in the assessment of Futurama’s Big Brain of Tom Sawyer (and by extension Mark Twain’s entire output) as a ‘corny slice of Americana.’

Despite all early promptings, I came to reading Twain fairly late in the game, but then my interest kind of took off. It was certainly helped by the Ken Burns 2001 documentary on Mark Twain, which helped contextualize both the man and his works. Before that I just sort of slid easily along on the common incidents and tropes, made familiar by a dozen adaptations: whitewashing a fence, pretending to be dead and showing up at your own funeral, lost in a cave, adventuring on a raft. “It was Injun Joe! He did it!” An eclipse of the sun and knights on bicycles. Riverboats navigating the Mississippi.

I was pleased to find the original sources of all these images and more. I can certainly see what prompted Mr. Fleming’s fascination with Twain, both life and works. Looking at him you see an image of the American character, with all its flaws and virtues, unquestionably ‘of a time’ but somehow timeless in nature, a comet blazing across the sky that will almost certainly come again. But in what form, and what will it see?

Thursday Thoughts: The Elizabethan Age

In the Shadow Library

Well, all this Shakespeare over the past few days of course have put me in mind of his milieu, the Elizabethan Age, with perhaps a bit of overlap with the Jacobean Age, like Shakespeare himself. Last night I put on Elizabeth R., the 1971 BBC miniseries. I have vague memories of flipping past it on PBS, either in commercials or just going around the dial. My attention was snagged by strange costumes and odd, melancholy music.

Shakespeare, of course, was everywhere, woven into the DNA of popular culture, but mostly in a semi-embarrassed nature, men in hose and codpieces using a lot of thees and thous and -eths, everywhere from Hamlet on Gilligan’s Island (“I ask to be, or not to be …) to Romeo and Juliet (“Romeo, oh, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”) everywhere, from cartoons to sitcoms. There was even advertising for Falstaff beer, featuring the rotund, jovial toper from Henry IV, etc. Shakespeare was a vast omnipresent mythology almost totally dark to me. I remember looking into the squat red Complete Plays in Omi’s middle room and trying to puzzle out the first play (The Tempest); the text was printed in double columns, like a Bible. I must have been 9 or 10.

Well, my familiarity with Shakespeare grew over the years. Romeo and Juliet in middle school, I think (I tried writing my own play, The Three Loonies; or The Stolen Letter); in high school we read Julius Caesar (and I tried to put on a half-assed, self-edited version of King Lear in Drama); and then came the great class with Dr. Walz in college where I really got into the Bard. I began delving into the background of the plays, the history of Shakespeare and his age, and his fellow playwrights of the time.

It didn’t hurt that there was a backlog of Shakespeare films on tap, from Laurence Olivier, to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to Orson Welles, to Franco Zeffirelli. Every decade there were new films coming out, from straight historical presentations of the plays to stories adapted to modern settings (often with interpretations that the playwright could never have imagined), to biographies about Shakespeare himself.

In addition to this embarrassment of riches from Shakespeare, the Elizabethan Age itself offers vast interest and varied diversion. Here are a few volumes I would like that are on the Wish List, three added just last night.