Posted 10:03 AM by Gene

Thanks to the usual AHTSJournal we've just come across Mr. Keillor's scathing review of Mark Twain's "memoirs", a book already condemned for its scholastic embalming job (subscription only, blast it). Rather than attack it for the source (who can be riotously unfunny himself) we see in it a rare justice in calling this master out. Twain was a great author ("the first two-thirds" of Huck Finn sounds about right, though we place it from between the time Huck escapes his Pa and the time Tom Sawyer wanders back in after a seven-year hiatus) and an extraordinarily self-indulgent one. We forget that most of his "humor" went into his innumerable short pieces, and the first volume of the Library of America's edition is profound testimony to his unfunny. Those who know the notorious names of Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, Twain's contemporaries (and likewise pseudonymous), will know the bad. We fear the true nature of the man is revealed in a duality: the private printing of "1601", an inside schoolboy chortle as witless as it is scabrous, and after the death of this daughter Jean, when he attempted to express "the inexpressible" and descended to bathos. He stopped writing after that, after he'd already written too much. Let us revere Twain, but let's not prop the pedestal up too high lest the whole reverence come crashing down.