_A MARK TWAIN FORUM  NOTE &/OR QUERY_

"Mark Twain and Jack Spicer: Tom Sawyer Surrealized"

by Wesley Britton
(C) 1996, by Annie1 Hwo Whantzit

American writer Jack Spicer (1925-1965)  was a Bay Area poet who
both preceded and participated in the "Beat" circle of anti-
mainstream authors, although Spicer's reputation was largely
regional until 1975 when friend and fellow poet Robin Blaser issued
_The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_ which brought the poet's
surreal canon into national prominence.

     Reviewing Spicer's landmark  _The Heads of the Town up to the
Aether_ (1962), critic Michael Davidson found a perhaps obscure
connection between Spicer and Twain.  In the section of the poem,
"A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud", Spicer creates a
mythological and mysterious adventure story in which Rimbaud and
the reader, according to Davidson,  "becomes a member of a secret
society who has pledged his faith to that code which holds it
together (511).  Scary stories, magical incantations, baseball
lore, word games and oaths operate to create the atmosphere of Tom
Sawyer's gang" (511).  To develop this point, I believe in this
boy's club, Rimbaud experiences youthfulness surrounded by Twainian
images of death, ghosts, and aloneness evoking both _Huck Finn_
and, on many levels, Twain's own surreal desolate ships described
in the fragments collected in _The Devil's Race-Track_. For
_Aether_, in the poet's own words, is "a system of fake dreams" in
a "boys club where the past matters" (Spicer 178-9).

     Twainian imagery begins early in the poem when Spicer evokes
Joan of Arc, demonstrating his own streak of humor, a subject he
addresses throughout the poem:

     Joan of Arc
     Built an ark
     In which she placed
     Three peas
     --Can you imagine translating this poem into New English--
     In the ark
     Were three ghosts
     Named Hymen, Simon, and Byron (138)

     The poem is replete with river imagery, is set on a river to
the underworld--or hell, or the hell of Southern plantations in the
eyes of slaves--with continuous references to President James
Buchanan and an African poet named "Jim". "Wharf rats" run along
the "Meuse River" which "runs to an ocean/which runs to a number of
oceans" (153). John the Baptist is a "river merchant, logician" and
"In the middle of the river of our life/ Things have passage" while
"a black raft" (mentioned three times) floats by while Rimbaud
dreams of Africa (160-1).
   In the same year, Spicer wrote an even more Twainian serial-
poem, _The Holy Grail_ about the "spoiled quest" reminiscent of _A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_.  Like Hank Morgan, the
first poem, "The Book of Gawain" is "a book of failure" (189).
Gawain is juxtaposed against Merlin as "poetry and magic see the
world from opposite ends" (191) just as Morgan and Merlin were
opposites on the sides of technology and magic.  The time flow of
history is altered in "The Book of Percival" when the knight
remembers both the forests of Arthur and working in Chicago wearing
the "tin armor" of the man in Oz (194).  With Twainian wit,
Lancelot observes "The Irish only invented three things: Boston,
The Grail, and fairies" (195). Guinevere is "tired of the invisible
world" of spooks and Salt Lake City (201) while a "metaphysical
policeman," like Hank Morgan, builds a radio station and "listens
to the music of the Grail."  Merlin sees, of all people, "Mary
Baker Eddy alone in her attempt/To shake Thursdays" before the
magician is called to the phone to learn the fate of Britain (203-
205).

     Time shifts also occur in the "Book of Galahad" who has a
voice like Walt Whitman (206).  He is the only one allowed to find
"the Grail like a flashlight" where "the dead stay dead" and
Galahad alone floats away in "a red balloon" (206-7). Jay Gould and
Cornelius Vanderbilt then preside over the "Death of Arthur" where
Arthur, "banjo on my knee," meets Marilyn Monroe in "materials
distorted from their original form" (210-2).  The dream of Camelot
has failed in "a supermarket of bones""as real as tomorrow" (215).

     It would be too much to suggest Mark Twain served as a source
for Spicer's comic surrealism, but the parallels are interesting,
especially for reviewers without a new Twain book to read.  Sigh.
As Spicer died an alcoholic death, some eminent Twainian familiar
with this milieu, say, Howard Baetzhold or, better, Larry Marsden,
will pick up the glass and develop this issue for the Elmira
Conference.  (If not in the main room, certainly in "Hello
Central," the little bar where all the real brain activity
happens.)

BIB(overalls)ODDRAPHY

Davidson, Michael. "Jack Spicer." _Contemporary Literary
     Criticism_. Vol. 18. 509-14

Spicer, Jack. _The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_. Ed., Robin
     Blaser.  Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.