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Date: | Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:35:31 -0800 |
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Here's an article I found in a recent magazine. I think you'll find it amusing:
From: "Mark Twain's Postmortem Stinker." _Civilization_. Jan./Feb. 1996: 10.
When _The New Yorker_ recently published a "lost" chapter of _Huckleberry
Finn_, it wasn't the first time readers had heard Mark Twain speaking from
beyond the grave. In 1917, seven years after the author's death, a New
York publisher brought out a new novel that Twain had supposedly written.
At the meetings of "a small psychical research society," the late
writer--or a disembodied spirit _claiming_ to be Twain--had dictated an
entire novel, letter by letter, on a Ouija board.
Twain's ghost may have lived on, but his prose was dead as a doornail. The
posthumous novel, _Jap Herron_, is a dreary tale of a pseudo-Sawyerish
urchin so irritatingly well behaved that a genuine Twain hero would have
sent him home bawling with his eyes blackened. And could the author of
_Huckleberry Finn_ have stomached _Jap Herron_'s boilerplate dialect
("'Mis' Luellen allus said that she could smell a Yankee a mile'") and
nauseous purple passages ("'Jap,' she gasped painfully, 'is this the thing
called Death, this uplift of joy?'")? The real Twain wasn't fooling around
with Ouija boards--he was turning in his grave.
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