_Mark Twain:  Historical Romances: The Prince and the Pauper, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Personal Recollections of Joan
of Arc_.  Edited by Susan K. Harris. (Library of America--71.)  New York:
Library of America, 1994.  Pp. 1031.  Cloth, 5" x 8-1/4".  ISBN
0-940450-82-8.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Ted Ficklen, University of Missouri-St Louis
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Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1994

     I spent my childhood in a Carnegie library, one of those great brick
endowments to learning.  I would like to think that I read every book
there, but I did not, there were too many.  I spent a lot of time there
touching the books, though, running them through my hands, feeling the
pages, peering down the spines.  So if most of the books there I didn't
read, I touched them at least once.  The library had three floors, a
children's room in the basement, which I avoided once I was old enough
to walk, the adult books on the main floor, and at the top, on the third
level, they stored the older fiction, the novels that no one read
anymore.  Or it seemed no one read them.  These were the classics, the
books that last, and week after week the shelves stayed in perfect
order, no leaning gaps where volumes here and there had been removed.
A used room does not stay neat.  This was a tidy place.  The books
pretty much stayed where they had been put.  It was quiet, comfortable,
darker than the other floors of the library.  When I think of the
literary canon, I remember places like this, where books go to be saved.
I did not so much sit up there and read the books as learn what they
were.  Like preparation to what I should be reading later--the Dickens,
the Melville, Twain, the impenetrable Joyce and Proust.

     Some of these I did read, could not help reading. _David Copperfield_
pulls you in even though he grows long winded as he ages.  _Moby Dick_
is not hard for a child until after the Pequod leaves the dock.
Twain was certainly in the company.  He is the recognizable author of
childhood--the one man whose books can be read cover to cover.

     Much of the best of Twain has already been published by the Library of
America, starting with the _Mississippi Writings_, which contains in
one volume all the Twain most people will ever read (_Tom Sawyer_,
_Huckleberry Finn_, _Life on the Mississippi_, and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_),
_The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It_, the two most readable travel
books, and finally the two volume set of _Collected Tales, Sketches,
Speeches, and Essays_.  _Historical Romances_, the latest volume,
collects three of what might be called children's books--at least, I
remember them most clearly from my own years on the third floor.  It is
a nice touch that two of Twain's most popular stories, _The Prince and
the Pauper_ and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ are
bound here with one of his least known, _Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc_.

     _Prince and The Pauper_ was a departure for Twain.  The story
is familiar now from the endless adaptations and retellings, but his
voice is not.  The voice of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is toned
way down, perhaps so as not to interrupt the adventure. There is
nothing that disturbs a child more than a joke in the middle of a
chase or a swordfight. This is Twain written for fans of Sir Walter Scott,
though the prose here is considerably leaner than any part of _Ivanhoe_.
It is a wonderful thing, re-reading _ Prince and the Pauper_  again, to
see how efficiently Twain gets from place to place.  I kept expecting the
book
to be funnier, but the story moves quickly and there is no fat here.

     _Connecticut Yankee_ is something more like what you might expect
from Twain writing an historical romance.  Again, here is a book that has
survived numerous adaptations, with everyone from Bing Crosby to Bugs Bunny
in the Hank Morgan role, but it will not die.  This is not so much a story
as a collection of situations suggested by the title.  One might call it
Tom Sawyer goes to Camelot, though the humor here is considerably
darker than in Twain's earlier books.  In the battle between chivalric
tradition and modern technology, there are no real winners.  Each side comes
up short.

     The most interesting feature of this Library of America collection
is the reappearance here of _Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_, Mark
Twain's one and only completely straight book.  It has been reprinted
occasionally in paperback, most recently in 1989 by Ignatius Press, San
Francisco, but has not been readily available in hardcover for decades.
One cannot escape the image of Twain, at the height of his celebrity as
white-suited humorist, itching to write this one serious literary project.
It has an air of ambition about it, as if the man is starting to think about
his place in posterity.

     I remember reading this book as a child.  There are some books one
comes across in childhood that seem to need to be read, as if lonely,
pleading on the shelf for a reader.  I must have been impressed at
the time by the book's determined tone of high seriousness.  Coming back to
this ground after twenty years I find I remember none of it.  Let me say
this:
there is nothing like a joke in the entire book.  There is not one breath of
sarcasm in it.  This has none of the vividness of Twain's best work--
everything connected with Joan seems suffused with a golden light, which is
pretty to look on at first, but dulls on repeated exposure.  We never see
below the surface of this puzzling girl; it seems obvious from the
beginning that she is destined for sainthood.  Everyone, other than her
inquisitors at her final trial, keeps a respectful distance.  I have a
feeling that this is a book better written about than read.  What, for
instance, is the significance of such hagiography so near the end of
Twain's career?  Is this book indicative of Twain's general attitude
toward women in his life or, more specifically, his daughters?  This new
edition of _Joan of Arc_ will make the text much more available to be
written
about.

     This volume is edited by Susan K. Harris, whose 1982 study, _Mark
Twain's Escape from Time_, considered these three novels.  It also included
a chapter on Twain's _Mysterious Stranger_, which might have just fit
into the present volume, though it already tops out at over a thousand
pages.  The arrangement of _Historical Romances_ is as fine as one would
expect from the Library of America.  The texts of _Prince and the Pauper_
and
_Connecticut Yankee_ are those established by the Mark Twain Project and
previously published by the University of California Press.  _Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc_ is reprinted from the first American edition,
originally published by Harper in 1896.  The forty-eight page chronology of
Twain's life is the same as published in the earlier Library of America
edition of Twain's _Collected Tales..._, still a helpful and wonderfully
detailed improvement on the shorter chronology published in _Mississippi
Writings_.

     There are very few notes here provided to the text.  Dr Harris provides
only four pages to cover all three books.  There is the familiar disclaimer
Library of America always prints that, "no note is made for material
included
in standard desk-reference books...," which strikes rather a sour chord.
If one really wanted to go looking things up, the California editions are
still
the definitive choice and it is not to be expected that Library of America
would supplant those.  Still, a few more notes would make this volume an
invaluable carryall.  The glory of this edition, as with other Library of
America volumes, is having so much text in such a neat little package.

      It must be said, at least, that this is the first time _Joan of Arc_
has
been reprinted authoritatively with any notes at all.  There are two small,
but helpful maps of Orleans and 15th Century France reprinted from Vita
Sackville-West's _Joan of Arc_ (1936).  It is a shame there are not more
historical notes, but this is probably the closest thing to an authoritative
edition scholars will have before the Mark Twain Project publishes its
version.

Ted Ficklen
University of Missouri - St Louis