The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Read Free

brilliance of visual images. The visual intelligence can act as a tight check on the aural one; the latter may run wild, like a weed, until one is writing sound for its own sweet sake. James in his later phase dictated much of his fiction, and as a result his work of that period is marked by prolixity, dilution, and sometimes a vagueness of meaning. Of course, it can be argued that he adopted dictation to satisfy the requirements of a genius which was declining. The trouble here is that it would be a difficult task to chart and to prove the actual falling off of his genius apart from the mannerisms which had begun to afflict it. One wonders if the visual sense in literature, especially in terms of formal design, has not overreached itself in our century with the production of works like Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Mann’s
Joseph and his Brethren
, and parts of the great Proust novel, and if the impetus to their excesses was not at least partly the excesses of the aural sense, as witnessed in a writer like Dickens.
    It is a large part of Twain’s greatness that he heard so well. His dialogue is extraordinary. One sometimes wonders if he had a phonographic memory. His ability to imitate styles of speech, with a vast array of accurate detail, is truly remarkable. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, has written: “At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his napkin and talking—talking in a strain and with a charm that he could never quite equal with his pen. It is the opinion of most people who knew Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius.” Twain and the oral tradition: both are related to the frontier. Yet some of his chief faults stem directly from this side of his genius—an occasional looseness of texture, a kind of stage or vaudeville timing for effect, an overindulgence in burlesque, a sense as if he were lecturing from a platform. Early in his public career he achieved success as a lecturer and as a maker of speeches, and no doubt this success, this practice, this buttressed confidence in a talent he long must have known he possessed, had a crucial influence upon his work.
    There is a certain transparency in Twain’s work, like that to be found in fairy tales. One senses the machinery behind the silken screen. But in this very transparency there is a kind of potency also found in the fairy tales, a foreknowledge of events, a delight in repetition, in the spelling out of the known, a sort of tribal incantation. There is also something abstract in certain of his fictions, some sort of geometric approach to the art of narrative which, to the modern reader, is not quite satisfying. I refer to pieces like
The American Claimant
and
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
. The latter is a very imperfect work whose imperfections are traceable to its conception, or rather misconception, a fact which Twain himself has revealed at some length. But when he speaks out of his own mouth, with the drawl and idiom and dialect, as he does in so many of his stories, he is unique, inspired, zany, wonderful.
    This man loved a gimmick the way the frontier loved a practical joke. He claimed to be the first private user of the telephone; the first author to use a typewriter; the first author to dictate into a phonograph recording machine. He fooled around with inventions with the passion of an inveterate gambler, and lost his shirt. A literary gimmick sometimes caused him to lose his literary shirt. His favorite of his own books was his
Joan of Arc
, which purports to be the recollections of a friend of Joan’s. It is sentimental and dull, as it was likely to be, not being done in Twain’s own voice and style.
    It is a fact that Twain, like many other nineteenth-century novelists, is sometimes guilty of padding. This is often due to the economics of book production of his