Incidentally, this piece really did come from The New Republic.
I tried to copy-and-paste the link but was unsuccessful in bringing
it up, until I eliminated the carats at each end. Then, it worked.
Is this Michael Lewis -- the author of The Big Short and
Liar's Poker? If it is, I'm even more perplexed. Sort of
with an, "Oh, my."
No one will ever convince me that Twain didn't believe deep down
that "The Machine" wouldn't turn up trumps, until it failed the final test
and HH Rogers rendered the verdict. To call it "doomed" is pure
hindsight, in my humble opinion. Anyone can tell you the score
after the game is over. Especially when it's been over 115 years.
Roger Durrett
Charlotte, NC
In a message dated 6/29/2011 7:54:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
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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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