Attended the Mark Twain session last night with my wife and son. We got in at 7 for the 7:30 program, and a good number of the 100-150 seats were already spoken for. The flyer said that there would be an autographing session following the program, so I did the smart thing and bought a copy of Shelby Foote's Shiloh, to avoid the rush at the end. The room was filled with equipment for a three camera video production. Promptly at 7:30, the authors lined up to the left of the platform. We wondered which author looked like Bill Murray. The CEO of Barnes & Noble got up and announced that the man who looked like Bill Murray was indeed Bill Murray who was there to read the ghost story that had been left out of the final editing of Huck Finn. His handling of the different voices was on par with Hal Holbrook, and soon he had the audience laughing uproariously. Next the authors were introduced. Brent Staples, the moderator is a novelist and editorial writer for our local newspaper, the Times. The final linup for the program was Shelby Foote, William Styron, Roy Blount and Justin Kaplan. Styron, who looks like a somewhat beefier Jerry Spence without the fringe coat said that he could identify with the whole uproar that has accompanied Huck Finn because he took tons of abuse after the publication of Confessions of Nat Turner - he was called a racist and someone who played on southern stereotypes of black men going after white women. Styron was also the first to go after Jane Smiley for her essay in attack of Huck Finn (Staples said that Smiley was invited to the forum but had other things to do that night - smart move). Styron's view of Smiley's essay was blunt - he said it was the dumbest essay he ever read. All four speakers had extreme differences with Smiley that night. Kaplan couched his criticism with a statement of how much he admired Smiley's fiction. Foote said that Smiley had used a lot of words to arrive at a conclusion that was exactly wrong. He said that Huck Finn was a great book and Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book that he was never able to finish. He said that Twain's books benefited from the fact that Twain was himself a colorful and larger-than-life character. Staples, who is black, turned the discussion towards the race problems inherent in the story. There was a long discussion of what was recently tagged the 'N word.' Styron said that Robert Penn Warren told him that everybody in America is a racist. Foote agreed with this. He said that when he grew up in Mississippi, his family was too genteel to use that word in the home, but it still permeated his whole childhood. Staples said that he hears it a hundred times a day from other black people, but this is an in-group thing - blacks are entitled to use the word but nobody else. Smiley complained that the only thing the book does is obvious to anybody - shows that Jim is a human being. Foote pointed out that in the context of pre Civil War America, this is not an obvious fact. He said that the crux of the book was Huck's realization that he would go to hell for believing that Jim was as human as he was. In contrast, Tom Sawyer never did figure it out. Staples also played devil's advocate by throwing in feminist criticism that Finn is a male fantasy and that there are no strong female characters - in fact, women are just people who get in the way of men. Blount pointed out that he has read many feminist novels that contained men who were just a nuisance. A number of people had questions or comments. Most were complimentary but one woman in a state of obvious agitation said that students were getting nothing out of the book but snickers for its use of the N word. Maybe it was a plane going by, but I swear I heard the faint sound of laughter from above. One man who apologized for not being a Twain scholar said that he had read that much of Twain's writing was censored by his wife. Finally, yours truly got up and mentioned that Twain censored himself due to his drive to be respectable. The culmination of this was the book Personal recollections of Joan of Arc. This produced blank stares from everybody on the panel but Kaplan who said that Twain did sell out sometimes and hated himself for it. Finally, Staples left the role of moderator and said that the book should be taught and it should be **taught**. This means (I think) that it should be a part of the curriculum and that it should also be used to show a part of American history that won't go away. He said that Twain could see that this would be played out over and over for long into the future. When the session ended, there were several surprises. While people were lining up with their books for autographing, Foote, Styron and Kaplan were spirited away to a freight elevator and gone for the evening. Bill Murray had stayed for the whole program and stuck around to chat with anybody who wanted to. My son was thrilled to talk to a movie star and get him to autograph our copy of the Village Voice. Since we were on a roll, we found Blount and got him to autograph it too. He told me "I just won't autograph a female condom." (The cover story was about female condoms). Next, I asked the video operator what they were going to do with all that footage. "We're from C-SPAN," he said. "Omygod," I said. "My bald spot is going to be on national TV?" "Better yours than mine," he replied. In summing up, I found Staples to be an extremely thoughtful and talented moderator. Nobody captured the fun side of Twain better than Blount, who was delightful to listen to. I wouldn't mind if Blount or Bill Murray recorded the entire book. Kaplan was soft-spoken and knew Twain inside out. Styron was every inch the literary lion. However, with his charisma and magnificent Southern speaking voice, Shelby Foote came close to showing what it would be like having Mark Twain in the lecture hall. It was something. Terry Ballard