Whew, indeed. Hard to know where to begin on a diatribe
such as that. But it is interesting to read and to contemplate
the point of view that spawned it.
Does anyone seriously believe Mark Twain actually thought of himself
as a great writer? "By forever, I mean 30 years,..." comes to mind.
As does the word, "bucksheesh." Money was important, or it's lack
thereof even more so, most of his adult life. This comment posted by
Arianne must come from someone so young as to not have had much
experience in the rough-and-tumble world of commerce, or it comes from
one blessed with a silver spoon. I assume, of course, and that can be both
dangerous and foolish and wrong. Could be the writer is a septagenarian.
Why wouldn't a man who enthralled audiences for years on the platform
not find talking the most efficacious mode of summing up? Duh.
This really is an interesting turn in the usual discourse of the List.
However,
it is hard to be dismissive of it, without risking the same puzzlement that
I once felt upon receiving a grade on a paper with the singular comment:
"D-. Your opinion is wrong."
Are there multitudes of younger readers out there who may feel similarly to
the one who wrote this blast?
I'm usually content with observing. But those thoughts passed along by
Arianne
prompted me to post.
Best,
Roger Durrett
Charlotte, NC
In a message dated 6/29/2011 7:54:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Whew! Friend sent this to me and thought you'd want to know.
Arianne Laidlaw
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06/29/11
The Eternal Boyhood of Mark
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*Michael Lewis* *|FACEBOOK:LIKE:
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is hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so many
things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great writers
are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not only
published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have noticed the
difference between his good ones and his bad ones. Great writers are not
meant to care more about money than art. Twain cared so much about money
that what little he writes about his art in his autobiography is almost
entirely, and obsessively, about the business end of things: his paychecks,
his promotional tours, his financial disputes with publishers, his venture
capital investments in publishing and printing technology. He stops and
starts Huckleberry Finn over and again to devote vast amounts of his time
and energy to losing $190,000 (roughly $4 million today) in a doomed
typesetting machine, and nearly bankrupts himself. Great writers are
expected to be interested in ideas; they should associate themselves with
at
least a few convictions. Apart from a frontier notion of freedom, Twain
never met an idea he could not reduce to a joke. He doesn’t even appear to
have been wedded to his own skepticism.
At the very least, great writers are supposed to think that writing is an
important, if not a sacred, activity. When Twain set out to write the story
of his life, he found the written word wanting (“too literary”), and
elected
instead to dictate it. The book in question has been advertised and sold as
the autobiography that Mark Twain wrote and declined to publish in his
lifetime because the material was simply too shockingly honest. There are
enough hoaxes in this claim to make Tom Sawyer blush. Twain didn’t write
it;
hardly any of it is shockingly honest; just about all the material in it
has
seen print in one form or another, either in biographies of Twain or in
Twain’s own magazine work. The book weighs in at 736 pages printed in a
microscopic font, which gives it the feel of a serious and deeply felt
venture. For its editors, it clearly was; but for Twain, I’m not so sure.
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