Attended the Mark Twain session last night with my wife and son. We
got in at 7 for the 7:30 program, and a good number of the 100-150 seats
were already spoken for. The flyer said that there would be an
autographing session following the program, so I did the smart thing and
bought a copy of Shelby Foote's Shiloh, to avoid the rush at the end. The
room was filled with equipment for a three camera video production.
   Promptly at 7:30, the authors lined up to the left of the platform. We
wondered which author looked like Bill Murray. The CEO of Barnes & Noble
got up and announced that the man who looked like Bill Murray was indeed
Bill Murray who was there to read the ghost story that had been left out
of the final editing of Huck Finn. His handling of the different voices
was on par with Hal Holbrook, and soon he had the audience laughing
uproariously.
   Next the authors were introduced. Brent Staples, the moderator is a
novelist and editorial writer for our local newspaper, the Times. The
final linup for the program was Shelby Foote, William Styron, Roy Blount
and Justin Kaplan. Styron, who looks like a somewhat beefier Jerry Spence
without the fringe coat said that he could identify with the whole uproar
that has accompanied Huck Finn because he took tons of abuse after the
publication of Confessions of Nat Turner - he was called a racist and
someone who played on southern stereotypes of black men going after white
women. Styron was also the first to go after Jane Smiley for her essay in
attack of Huck Finn (Staples said that Smiley was invited to the forum
but had other things to do that night - smart move). Styron's view of
Smiley's essay was blunt - he said it was the dumbest essay he ever read.
All four speakers had extreme differences with Smiley that night. Kaplan
couched his criticism with a statement of how much he admired Smiley's
fiction. Foote said that Smiley had used a lot of words to arrive at a
conclusion that was exactly wrong. He said that Huck Finn was a great
book and Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book that he was never able to finish.
He said that Twain's books benefited from the fact that Twain was himself
a colorful and larger-than-life character.
   Staples, who is black, turned the discussion towards the race problems
inherent in the story. There was a long discussion of what was recently
tagged the 'N word.' Styron said that Robert Penn Warren told him that
everybody in America is a racist. Foote agreed with this. He said that
when he grew up in Mississippi, his family was too genteel to use that
word in the home, but it still permeated his whole childhood. Staples
said that he hears it a hundred times a day from other black people, but
this is an in-group thing - blacks are entitled to use the word but
nobody else. Smiley complained that the only thing the book does is
obvious to anybody - shows that Jim is a human being. Foote pointed out
that in the context of pre Civil War America, this is not an obvious
fact. He said that the crux of the book was Huck's realization that he
would go to hell for believing that Jim was as human as he was. In
contrast, Tom Sawyer never did figure it out.
   Staples also played devil's advocate by throwing in feminist criticism
that Finn is a male fantasy and that there are no strong female
characters - in fact, women are just people who get in the way of men.
Blount pointed out that he has read many feminist novels that contained
men who were just a nuisance.
   A number of people had questions or comments. Most were complimentary
but one woman in a state of obvious agitation said that students were
getting nothing out of the book but snickers for its use of the N word.
Maybe it was a plane going by, but I swear I heard the faint sound of
laughter from above. One man who apologized for not being a Twain scholar
said that he had read that much of Twain's writing was censored by his
wife. Finally, yours truly got up and mentioned that Twain censored
himself due to his drive to be respectable. The culmination of this was
the book Personal recollections of Joan of Arc. This produced blank
stares from everybody on the panel but Kaplan who said that Twain did
sell out sometimes and hated himself for it.
   Finally, Staples left the role of moderator and said that the book
should be taught and it should be **taught**. This means (I think) that
it should be a part of the curriculum and that it should also be used to
show a part of American history that won't go away. He said that Twain
could see that this would be played out over and over for long into the
future.
   When the session ended, there were several surprises. While people
were lining up with their books for autographing, Foote, Styron and
Kaplan were spirited away to a freight elevator and gone for the evening.
Bill Murray had stayed for the whole program and stuck around to chat
with anybody who wanted to. My son was thrilled to talk to a movie star
and get him to autograph our copy of the Village Voice. Since we were  on
a roll, we found Blount and got him to autograph it too. He told me "I
just won't autograph a female condom." (The cover story was about female
condoms).
   Next, I asked the video operator what they were going to do with all
that footage. "We're from C-SPAN," he said. "Omygod," I said. "My bald
spot is going to be on national TV?" "Better yours than mine," he replied.
   In summing up, I found Staples to be an extremely thoughtful and
talented moderator. Nobody captured the fun side of Twain better than
Blount, who was delightful to listen to. I wouldn't mind if Blount or
Bill Murray recorded the entire book.  Kaplan was soft-spoken and knew
Twain inside out. Styron was every inch the literary lion. However, with
his charisma and magnificent Southern speaking voice, Shelby Foote came
close to showing what it would be like having Mark Twain in the lecture
hall. It was something.

Terry Ballard