Mark Twain: literary lion, steamboat pilot, intrepid adventurer, American legend, and…ferocious critic.
As the 100th anniversary of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ death approaches (on Wednesday), another aspect of Twain’s prolific talent comes to light in a New York Times article regarding his personal book collection. Courtesy of The Mark Twain Library in Redding, CT, hundreds of previously overlooked volumes from Twain’s own collection, pages and margins thick with the author’s scribbled notes, have emerged.
In his comments on the quality (and often quantity) of the literature he perused, Twain spared no one, not even his friends. He changed a word in Rudyard Kipling’s “Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses” from “heaved” to “hove” and added a semi-colon a few pages later, where he felt his friend’s grammar had gone amiss. Both Kipling and Twain received honorary degrees from Oxford in 1907 and Twain was otherwise an admirer of Kipling’s work. However, Kipling wouldn’t have felt too slighted by Twain’s corrections: Samuel Johnson and Robert Louis Stevenson also received umbrage from Twain’s pen.
Twain’s comments are pert and biting; he called “Saratoga in 1901″ by Melville Landon “The Droolings of an Idiot” and suggested that Kate Saint Maur’s “The Earth’s Bounty” would be vastly improved by eliminating pages 370 and 371. He was also a wide and avid reader — his collection included both the Bible and the Koran, Epictetus, works by H.G. Wells and Charles Darwin, and “Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller”, to which he gave unusual praise.
Reading of Twain’s notes makes me smile, and wish that I could look at these pages, thickly blanketed in
Painting by Susan B. Durkee
Twain’s “cramped, scratchy handwriting.” I love that the Times article described him as “irrepressible” in his desire to comment on other authors’ work. I can almost see him, sitting in a deep leather chair in a rumpled white suit, perhaps with one of his fantastically-named cats* on his knee, a long, curling pipe protruding from beneath his voluminous mustache, scribbling through the books with the occasional bad-tempered mutter. To see these books, covered with these small gems of criticism, little corners of his thoughts left on the page, must be an extraordinary experience.
The Times article also touches on another, seldom-acknowledged fact of Twain’s later life: his devotion to the creation of a library for the town of Redding, now The Mark Twain Library. The author donated $6,000 and thousands of his own books to form the institution, and badgered his friends, such as Andrew Carnegie, to pitch in. Heather Morgan, director of The Mark Twain Library, said that the shelves are still peppered with a few of Twain’s own books, like the 105-year-old volume of G.K. Chesterton’s that she unearthed last month.
* Twain’s cats: Sour Mash, Appollinaris, Zoroaster, and Blatherskite, to name a few.
Great story about a great man. It is hard not to love this great American icon. He seems to have gotten his wish when he said.” Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.”
In remembering him today I looked up some of his famous quotes and they are irresistible and compel you to share them so here are a few.
“Necessity is the mother of taking chances.”
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
“My books are like water: those of the great genuises are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.”
“Drag your thoughts away fron your troubles by the ears, by the heels
or any other way you can manage it.”
“Facts are stubborn but statistics are more pliable.
“When I was young I could remember anything, whether it happend or not.”
“To succeed in life you need two things, ignorance and confidence.”
Mark Twain
Liv, wow..very well written, direct, informative and truely sensitive to the great man…I am sure you would have been one of his dear anglefish if the Tmore successful and continued..Twaining.
Fond Regards, Susan