_A MARK TWAIN FORUM NOTE &/OR QUERY_ "Mark Twain and Jack Spicer: Tom Sawyer Surrealized" by Wesley Britton (C) 1996, by Annie1 Hwo Whantzit American writer Jack Spicer (1925-1965) was a Bay Area poet who both preceded and participated in the "Beat" circle of anti- mainstream authors, although Spicer's reputation was largely regional until 1975 when friend and fellow poet Robin Blaser issued _The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_ which brought the poet's surreal canon into national prominence. Reviewing Spicer's landmark _The Heads of the Town up to the Aether_ (1962), critic Michael Davidson found a perhaps obscure connection between Spicer and Twain. In the section of the poem, "A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud", Spicer creates a mythological and mysterious adventure story in which Rimbaud and the reader, according to Davidson, "becomes a member of a secret society who has pledged his faith to that code which holds it together (511). Scary stories, magical incantations, baseball lore, word games and oaths operate to create the atmosphere of Tom Sawyer's gang" (511). To develop this point, I believe in this boy's club, Rimbaud experiences youthfulness surrounded by Twainian images of death, ghosts, and aloneness evoking both _Huck Finn_ and, on many levels, Twain's own surreal desolate ships described in the fragments collected in _The Devil's Race-Track_. For _Aether_, in the poet's own words, is "a system of fake dreams" in a "boys club where the past matters" (Spicer 178-9). Twainian imagery begins early in the poem when Spicer evokes Joan of Arc, demonstrating his own streak of humor, a subject he addresses throughout the poem: Joan of Arc Built an ark In which she placed Three peas --Can you imagine translating this poem into New English-- In the ark Were three ghosts Named Hymen, Simon, and Byron (138) The poem is replete with river imagery, is set on a river to the underworld--or hell, or the hell of Southern plantations in the eyes of slaves--with continuous references to President James Buchanan and an African poet named "Jim". "Wharf rats" run along the "Meuse River" which "runs to an ocean/which runs to a number of oceans" (153). John the Baptist is a "river merchant, logician" and "In the middle of the river of our life/ Things have passage" while "a black raft" (mentioned three times) floats by while Rimbaud dreams of Africa (160-1). In the same year, Spicer wrote an even more Twainian serial- poem, _The Holy Grail_ about the "spoiled quest" reminiscent of _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_. Like Hank Morgan, the first poem, "The Book of Gawain" is "a book of failure" (189). Gawain is juxtaposed against Merlin as "poetry and magic see the world from opposite ends" (191) just as Morgan and Merlin were opposites on the sides of technology and magic. The time flow of history is altered in "The Book of Percival" when the knight remembers both the forests of Arthur and working in Chicago wearing the "tin armor" of the man in Oz (194). With Twainian wit, Lancelot observes "The Irish only invented three things: Boston, The Grail, and fairies" (195). Guinevere is "tired of the invisible world" of spooks and Salt Lake City (201) while a "metaphysical policeman," like Hank Morgan, builds a radio station and "listens to the music of the Grail." Merlin sees, of all people, "Mary Baker Eddy alone in her attempt/To shake Thursdays" before the magician is called to the phone to learn the fate of Britain (203- 205). Time shifts also occur in the "Book of Galahad" who has a voice like Walt Whitman (206). He is the only one allowed to find "the Grail like a flashlight" where "the dead stay dead" and Galahad alone floats away in "a red balloon" (206-7). Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt then preside over the "Death of Arthur" where Arthur, "banjo on my knee," meets Marilyn Monroe in "materials distorted from their original form" (210-2). The dream of Camelot has failed in "a supermarket of bones""as real as tomorrow" (215). It would be too much to suggest Mark Twain served as a source for Spicer's comic surrealism, but the parallels are interesting, especially for reviewers without a new Twain book to read. Sigh. As Spicer died an alcoholic death, some eminent Twainian familiar with this milieu, say, Howard Baetzhold or, better, Larry Marsden, will pick up the glass and develop this issue for the Elmira Conference. (If not in the main room, certainly in "Hello Central," the little bar where all the real brain activity happens.) BIB(overalls)ODDRAPHY Davidson, Michael. "Jack Spicer." _Contemporary Literary Criticism_. Vol. 18. 509-14 Spicer, Jack. _The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_. Ed., Robin Blaser. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.