BRIEFLY NOTED: Books

The following notices were written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.

_Bambino and Mr. Twain_. By P. I. Maltbie. Illustrated by Daniel Miyares.
Charlesbridge, 2012. Pp. 33. Hardcover. $15.95. ISBN 978-1-58089-272-9.

This book is a charmingly told, sweetly illustrated, fictionalized account
of an incident that took place in April 1905, when Mark Twain was living at
21 Fifth Avenue in New York with his daughter Jean. Both were grieving
Livy's death the previous June. Clara, depressed and unable to cope with the
loss of her mother, was recovering at a sanitarium, but was not allowed to
keep her cat Bambino there, so Bambino was staying with Twain and Jean at
Fifth Avenue. Bambino vanished around midnight on March 31. A notice
offering a $5 reward was sent to at least two newspapers, but Bambino
reappeared that evening about four blocks away, and Mark Twain's secretary
Isabel Lyon and her mother chased him down the street and brought him home.
Twain was overjoyed to have Bambino back and carried him around his library
asking him about his exploits and guessing at how many harlots he had
enjoyed while away on his adventures. A week later, Zoe Anderson Norris, a
reporter from the _New York Times_, unable to interview Twain himself,
published an interview with Bambino instead. About a month later Bambino
briefly vanished again during the day, and returned smelling "streety"
according to Lyon. A decision was made to find another home for him, and one
of the Italian household maids found him a home with one of her friends on
May 1. Caio, Bambino!

In Maltbie's fictionalized account of the adventures of Bambino, Twain has
shut himself off from the world mourning for Livy, and one day watches
helplessly as Bambino jumps out a window to chase a squirrel and remains
missing for three days, all the while with people showing up at the door
offering their own cats in response to the newspaper notice. When Bambino
reappears on the morning of the fourth day Twain is overjoyed and learns the
lesson that "there's a whole world outside of this house to enjoy" and he
decides to engage life again. Although a work of fiction most of the details
are fact-based and the illustrations accurately portray Twain, Jean, the
Fifth Avenue house, the household furniture, Twain's billiard table, Livy,
and later on, Stormfield. The details that are factually incorrect are
trivial: Isabel Lyon is never mentioned in this account, Bambino's eyes were
yellow rather than blue, and he was barely gone a day.

Although several cats lived happily ever after at Stormfield, Bambino was
not among them. But this story succeeds on its own merits and delivers a
lesson without sermonizing. Maltbie provides a factual--if not
complete--account of Bambino's 1905 vanishing act at the end of the book.
She lists her sources which include Clara Clemens's _My Father, Mark Twain_,
Katy Leary's _A Lifetime with Mark Twain_, Ron Power's _Mark Twain, A Life_,
and the book based on Ken Burns's PBS film about Twain _Mark Twain: An
Illustrated Biography_. Most children would beg to hear this story told more
than once at bedtime.

The amazon web page for this book is:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580892728/twainwebmarktwaiA



_The Accursed_. By Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco (HarperCollins), 2013. Pp. 669.
Hardcover. $27.99. ISBN 978-0-06-223170-3.

Joyce Carol Oates, the award-winning author of more than fifty books, has
written a book that could serve as bedtime reading for many bedtimes.
Weighing in at nearly 700 pages and more than 2 pounds, this brick of a
novel takes place just as Bambino's big adventure ends, spanning the summer
of 1905 to the summer of 1906, and takes place mostly at Princeton
University and in Bermuda. The book includes in its cast of characters Mark
Twain, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, President Teddy Roosevelt, President and
Mrs. Grover Cleveland, future President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson's rumored
mistress Mrs. Mary Peck, some ghosts and vampires, and maybe Satan himself.
Twain is featured at pages 343-66 and 575-87, and mentioned in passing on
five other pages. It also includes plenty of sex, a rape, an Antarctic
voyage, a murder, parallel worlds, spiritualism, a wife-beater, a lynching,
a kidnapping, a "snake-frenzy," strange dreams, satire, paranoia, gossip,
side stories, socialism, and a confessional sermon whose deliverance is
interrupted--said some--by a ten foot snake that strangled the man at the
pulpit. It's downright gothic, and maybe even epic--the publicity material
says its structured using the Homeric ring structure of Homer, Ovid, and
Milton, which will make it an irresistible read to many.

Mark Twain, wearing his white suit and smoking stinky cigars, is part of the
action along with Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Peck in Bermuda. In April of 1906
a reference is made to the recent death of Twain's daughter, but Susy died
in 1896, Jean would live three more years, and Clara outlived them all by
five decades. Mere fiction, or did Oates have Livy in mind? Oates writes
that Twain was in love with Mrs. Peck and had met her several years before
the time of this story, another fiction. Rumors of an affair between Mrs.
Peck and Wilson circulated, and Wilson's letters leave no doubt that he was
infatuated with her. Oates suggests that Twain introduced Mrs. Peck to
Wilson to see if Wilson would succumb to her "charms." However, in reality,
Wilson spotted Peck when she walked across the dining room while he was
eating alone in a hotel and later met her at a party. The time sequence of
Oates's story is at serious odds with historical truth. Mark Twain was not
on the island during the period in which this novel takes place. In the
context of this sprawling novel and given the way these facts are presented
as rumors and put in the mouths or letters of other characters who may have
it all wrong, it would be unfair to take the author to task solely for her
infidelity to historical fact. This is a work of fiction, after all.

What is somewhat regrettable is that Twain had interesting connections with
some of the other historical figures who populate the pages of this novel,
but Oates does not make these connections. Twain was familiar with the works
of Upton Sinclair, and had read and praised _The Jungle_, and corresponded
with Sinclair and dined with him in Bermuda. The publication of _The Jungle_
and its influence and reception get a lot of attention in these pages, but
Twain does not share those pages. At one point (p. 511) Oates's fictional
Jack London makes fictional comments on Twain's defense of Jews, putting
London's anti-Semitism on ugly display. Oates repeatedly includes comments
by Sinclair and London about a coming socialist revolution, but she does not
include the historical Mark Twain's lacerating remark about the historical
Jack London's hypocrisy; Twain had commented that the wealthy London would
have to call out the army to collect his royalty checks if those dreams of a
working class revolution ever came true. Twain certainly had strong opinions
of Teddy Roosevelt (and Roosevelt of him) and he had met with Roosevelt at
the White House, just as he had met Grover Cleveland and his wife. But these
connections are unexploited. Twain was on familiar terms with Satan, but
when Satan appears incarnate in the story Twain is not around to engage him.
Of course, Oates was free to bend history to her fictional purposes, but
these unconnected dots were surely not left unconnected for lack of room or
a potential unraveling of the warp and weave of the plot.

What _is_ most disappointing, is that when Twain does make an appearance, he
is invariably mentioned in a negative light. He is by turns rough-hewn,
ill-mannered, smelly, condescending, strangely aged, drunk and unsteady on
his feet, and even his teeth are stained from smoking. In her previous
treatment of Twain in her fiction, a short story entitled "Grandpa Clemens &
Angelfish" (collected in _Wild Nights_, 2008), the story itself is an
unpleasant misreading of actual events and Twain is depicted as an
unsympathetic negative figure. Oates does not seem to like Mark Twain, or
Sam Clemens either.

In the novel itself some fictional sources are cited, all part of the fun of
fiction. But when Oates reappears on the very last page (p. 669) to
acknowledge her actual sources for this novel she declares that "the truths
of fiction reside in metaphor; but metaphor is here generated by History"
and she then lists her actual sources. Eight books about Woodrow Wilson are
listed, one book about the Antarctic and two about New Jersey, one each
about Jack London and Upton Sinclair, and a book about lynching, but nary a
Twain source among them. Clearly, the metaphoric Twain she creates was not
generated by "History." This book provides some thrilling reading and fine
satire and could be judged someday as Oates' epic masterpiece, but as
Twaints go, it just ain't. (For the definition of 'Twaint' the reader is
referred to the Mark Twain Forum review of Bill Macnaughton's _Mark Twain's
Civil War_ which appeared on the Mark Twain Forum March 4, 2013).

The amazon web page for this book is:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062231707/twainwebmarktwaiA