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Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
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Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:43:57 EDT
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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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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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