[N.B. The following review was written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, on
whose behalf I am merely posting it.  Many thanks to her for coming to
the rescue and writing this review so quickly, at short notice.  I
apologize to the Forum and to Mark Dawidziak for the delay between
publication and this review, which had nothing to do with the
reviewer, and everything to do with me. --T.R.]

BOOK REVIEW

     Mark Dawidziak (ed.), _Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing_ (New
     York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).  Cloth, 5-3/4" x 8-3/4".  Pp. xv +
     160.  Bibliography, index.  $17.95.  ISBN 0-312-14365-6.

     This book and many others are available at discounted prices from the
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     Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

          Shelley Fisher Fishkin <[log in to unmask]>
          University of Texas, Austin

     Copyright (c) 1999 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published
     or redistributed in any medium without permission.


Whether the book is designed to help the reader be a better manager,
salesperson, parent, party-giver, or partner, a standard formula prevails
in the self-help tomes of the '90s: simple principles expressed in pithy
prose accompanied by celebrity endorsements.  Twain was never shy about
trying his hand at popular genres that were new to him (as his experiments
in detective stories and science fiction demonstrate), or about recycling
and repackaging his words.  Were he to miraculously reappear today, he
would probably size up the market and its demands, and set about compiling
a how-to book for writers--only to find that Mark Dawidziak had beaten him
to it on his own turf.

_Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing_, is the kind of book Twain himself
might well have assembled.  It is also the kind of book Twain might have
enjoyed--which is saying a lot, given the high standards to which Twain
held all books (his own and others').

Let me say at the outset that (1) I have no financial stake in the sales
of this book, (2) I have never met its author, and (3) I am not fond of
hyperbole and exaggeration.  That being said, I'd like to assert that (1)
every Twainiac needs this book, (2) anyone trying to learn to write can't
help but learn something from this book, and (3) every Twainiac looking for
a gift for graduates, drop-outs, teachers, students, parents, children,
friends or enemies, should give this book.  (Why give this book to your
enemies?  To keep them guessing.  And to let them imagine themselves as the
implicit targets of Twain's more spiky barbs.)

Twain's most familiar quips on writing are, of course, widely known ("The
difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and the lightning bug"), as is his withering
attack on the literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.  Less known, as
Dawidziak makes clear, is the fact that Twain "was constantly writing about
writing.  Indeed he rarely strayed too far from an ongoing discussion of
the literary life."

The experience is familiar to everyone who has spent any time with Twain.
From his earliest books to his latest, the same thing keeps happening. You
pick up a volume persuaded that you will leave it edified about some new
subject or other only to find that you are once again hearing Twain
ruminate on writing.  His narrative of his trip to Europe in _Innocents
Abroad_ (1869), for example, often absorbs itself with the challenge of how
to write with originality and freshness about scenes so many writers have
tackled before, while his criticisms of Mary Baker Eddy in _Christian
Science_ (1907) often center on his problems with her prose style.  The
subject of writing allows Twain to address obliquely issues of honesty,
authenticity, and moral integrity while on the surface at least, simply
holding forth on what it means to communicate clearly.

It was an inspired idea to collect Twain's comments on writing in one
place.  Lucky for the reader, Dawidziak, sensible, witty, eloquent, wise
and well-read, seems to have been the right man for the job.  He has read
Twain avidly and appreciatively, and has culled his quotes with careful
attention from Mark Twain's works, from memoirs about Twain written by his
friends, from interviews, from letters (mailed and unmailed), from
autobiographical dictations.  The result is a masterful compendium of the
best things Twain said about writing and the writing life.  _Mark My Words_
combines useful insights into Twain's aesthetic and moral values, with a
cornucopia of helpful tips for the aspiring writer.  It is both encouraging
and intimidating--for Twain can be a rather daunting taskmaster.

Chapter One, "On the Mark," prefaces Twain's comments on writing with
celebrity endorsements.  The wide range of writers with something good to
say about Twain reminds the reader of Twain's richness and complexity.  Who
else, after all, could garner praise from E. B. White and Theodore Dreiser?
>From Jack London and T. S. Eliot?  From George Bernard Shaw, Willa Cather,
Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H. L. Mencken, Ben Hecht, Edmund Wilson, and
Robert Penn Warren?  On those rare occasions when Dawidziak's own authorial
voice intrudes, it is usually to segue into a capper from Twain himself--
such as his hypothesis about how Twain might respond to the foregoing
bouquet of compliments on _Huck Finn_: "Perhaps we should look to an 1893
speech where he said, 'I have seldom in my lifetime listened to compliments
so felicitously phrased or so well deserved.'"

Chapter Two, "The Clemens Companion to Good Writing," reminds the reader
of the emphasis Twain put on the joy of writing, and on the importance of
taking joy in our work.  "I am hard at work . . . merely for the love of
it," Twain wrote his friend William Dean Howells in 1881.  Or, as he
remarked to an interviewer in 1905, "No Sir, not a day's work in all my
life.  What I have done I have done because it has been play.  If it had
been work I shouldn't have done it."  The assemblage of quotes in this
section is fresh and appealing, a reminder that Twain took enormous
pleasure from producing work that in turn gave his readers great pleasure.

Twain displays his self-confidence with playful audacity ("There is no such
thing as 'the Queen's English,'" he remarked in _Following the Equator_.
"The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own
the bulk of the shares!") and airily dismisses the guardians of grammatical
exactitude.  (He quotes with approval a comment from a writer named Henry
H. Breen that "'To suppose that because a man is a poet or an historian,
he must be correct in his grammar, is to suppose that an architect must be
a joiner, or a physician a compounder of medicine.'" Twain adds, "Mr.
Breen's point is well taken.  If you should climb the mighty Matterhorn to
look out over the kingdom of the earth, it might be a pleasant incident to
find strawberries up there.  But Great Scott!  You don't climb the
Matterhorn for strawberries!")  Here we find Twain's famous utterances on
"unconscious influences" and plagiarism, on truth and fiction, on the three
ways of pleasing an author.  Some of the subheads may be rather arbitrary,
but every quote is there for a reason and repays our attention.

Twain, Dawidziak tells us, "was literary godfather of many of the
liberating rules of Strunk and White," and Twain's "sleekly modern" prose
style, Dawidziak maintains, anticipates many twentieth-century style books.
In Chapter Three, "Tips from Twain," Twain dramatizes many of those rules
by following them before our very eyes.  "I never write metropolis for
seven cents because I can get the same price for city.  I never write
policeman because I can get the same money for cop," Twain tells us.  Or,
"With a hundred words to do it with, the literary artisan could catch that
airy thought and tie it down and reduce it to a . . . cabbage, but the
artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower."  "A powerful agent
is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain," Twain
writes.  His marvelous images and memorable turns of phrase prove his
point: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the
last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his
Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

While some of Twain's comments here are familiar ("As to the adjective:
when in doubt, strike it out"), others are less known and quite useful,
such as the following quote from an 1876 letter to Frank E. Burroughs:
"There is one thing which I can't stand and _won't_ stand, from many
people.  That is sham sentimentality, the kind a schoolgirl puts into her
graduating composition, the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column
of a country newspaper, the rot that deals in 'the happy days of yore,' the
'sweet yet melancholy past,' with its 'blighted hopes' and its 'vanished
dreams'--and all that sort of drivel."  Or consider the following, from an
1878 letter to his brother Orion: "God only exhibits his thunder and
lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.  These are
God's adjectives.  You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases
to get under the bed by and by."

Anyone who has ever argued with a copyeditor will be heartened by the
excerpts included here from a l900 letter to a presumptuous editor ("It is
curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing,
nickel-plated word has for you," or "It was sound English before you
decayed it.  Sell it to the museum.").  Some of the advice Twain offers is
sage in an oxymoronic vein ("The time to begin writing an article is when
you have finished it to your satisfaction.")  Other advice is irrefutably
practical ("Write without pay until somebody offers pay.  If nobody offers
within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the
most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was
intended for.")

Chapter Four, "Training is Everything," assembles Twain's astute remarks
on the role of experience and direct observation culled from sources that
span Twain's entire career.  One of the intriguing benefits of this
assemblage is that the reader is reminded of how certain themes weave
through Twain's writing life with pedal-point insistence.  It is fun to see
him explore the same theme in very different tones and timbres.
"Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing
that puts the muscle and the breath and warm blood into the book he
writes," Twain wrote in 1909.  Or, as he put it in 1894, "a person that
started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was
always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or
doubtful."

Chapter Five, "Bringing In A Book (from Manuscript to Library Shelves),"
helps make Twain come to life as a writer as it addresses his "writing
gait"--his daily output of pages at different points in his career.  It
also includes tart rejoinders to his editor ("It is discouraging to try to
penetrate a mind like yours.  You ought to get it out and dance on it.
That would take some of the rigidity out of it."), his frustration with
reviewers ("Haven't you had reviewers talk Alps to you, and then print
potato hills?"), his exasperation with proofreading, and his comments on
the crucial importance of revision.

Chapter Six, "Riding the Range of Styles" includes advice on letter-writing
and speech-writing as well as a useful mini-tour of Twain's aesthetics, and
concludes with a roundup of some of Twain's most memorable similes.

Chapter Seven, "The Write Stuff" brings together Twain's fascinating
comments on other books and writers--including Cervantes' _Don Quixote_,
the Bible, Malory's _Morte D'Arthur_, the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyam,
Julius Caesar's Commentaries, and writing by Jonathan Swift, Benvenuto
Cellini, Samuel Pepys, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Dickens, Booth Tarkington,
George Washington Cable, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Oliver Goldsmith, Helen
Keller, William Dean Howells, and Emile Zola.

In Chapter Eight, "Literary Wrongs," Twain grumbles about writers he
prefers not to read--Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Bret Harte, John Milton, and others.  He famously refers to the
Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print," and waxes eloquent over the
literary sins of Mary Baker Eddy, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore
Cooper.

In Chapter Nine, "Twain on Twain," Twain weighs in with his opinions of
various of his own books--comments that are handy to have together in one
place.

_Mark My Words_ is handsomely put together.  Elegant typography, ample
white space, the occasional apt illustration, a useful bibliography, and
an index add to its appeal.  It can be read straight through or in small
segments--gulped or sipped, according to the reader's preferences and time
constraints.  The reader leaves it with fresh appreciation for Mark Twain's
genius, judgment, and generosity of spirit.