The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Read Free Page A

day. The two-volume work, often sold by subscription, often serialized, was as much the thing in those days as it is not now. If a man had only a book and a half in him, that was too bad; he had to get up the half somehow or throw in the towel. The effect of this can be seen all the way from Dickens to James. Forgetting this, we are likely to recall the size of nineteenth-century novels and think, “There were giants in those days.” There
were
giants, but the fact remains that many of the novels of the previous century can stand pruning, from our point of view.
    There is a new kind of padding which has come to flower in our own century, a kind not due to economics of book production, a kind which almost deliberately flies in the face of economics—the padding of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Faulkner. I suspect this sort has as its motive a gentle and harmless variety of megalomania, the desire to fill up culs-de-sac in such a way that no one can add a pound to them. It is time that the novel of elegant proportions returned to fashion and worth—the novel which by its intensity, elasticity, form and overtones achieves what the older ones have achieved through bulk. A whale is not by definition superior to a shark.
    It is almost needless to add that in the story the impulse or the need to pad was at a minimum, and that consequently there is more economy of effect in Twain’s stories than in most of his book-size works. One might even say that Twain felt most at home in the story, that it was the form most congenial to him, lover as he was of the yarn. It was the form which most effectively brought out his particular “voice.” Some of his full-size books are more like a series of yarns strung together, than works with an indigenous structure.
    Despite his great successes he remained an unfulfilled, unintegrated writer of uncertain taste. In
A Tramp Abroad
, for example, his desire was often for serious description of scene, influenced by the beauty of the landscape and the fact he had kept accurate notes. This conflicted with a desire to be funny, or a nervousness because he feared his reader’s attention was flagging. He broke up his descriptions with unfunny insertions of outlandish foreign words and phrases, creating a hodgepodge that was in poor taste, dull, and an affront to his considerable descriptive talents. His autobiography is a good example, although a late one, of his uncertain taste. He did not—he could not—write it in sequence, but drifted here and there, wherever idle memory (not always dependable) and a wandering stream of associations led him, at times lingering over minor events and hurrying past important ones. It is an important and neglected American document, justly neglected inasmuch as it is almost unreadable in its present form, the sequence of events garbled, and bits of daily journalism thrown in from the period in which he was composing it. And yet at its best it is remarkable and needs only a skilled hand to put it together properly. It is ready to emerge as a classic of its kind, although at present it is in the stage of being raw material. Twain did not always recognize the difference between raw material and the polished product, just as Henry James, inversely, sometimes mistook the polish of his prose for the material of life itself.
    Twain at his most balanced is likely to be found in his letters, where he could be himself, without having to please what he believed to be his audience and to satisfy his audience’s demand (whether real or imaginary) for more of the Twain brand of humor. He was in a sense the slave of his audience; or, more justly, the slave of what he conceived to be his duty toward his audience. When Twain is truly himself he is magnificent. How beautifully, how truly, how movingly he can write in the midst of deep emotion, as when he set down his thoughts immediately after the death of his daughter Jean. There is no false tone, no striving in his prose then. You sense he