Shelley Fisher Fishkin

The Library of America interviews
Shelley Fisher Fishkin about Mark Twain

In connection with the publication in March 2010 of The Mark Twain
Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, edited by Shelley Fisher
Fishkin, Rich Kelley conducted this exclusive interview for The Library of
America e-Newsletter. Sign up for the free monthly e-Newsletter at www.loa.org.

---

Could any other writer garner plaudits from a group as diverse as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Chuck Jones, Erica Jong, and Barack Obama? The cast of contributors to The Mark Twain Anthology is so rich—more than sixty writers who range from Twain’s contemporary, William Dean Howells, to novelist Min Jin Lee, born 133 years later. You mention in your introduction that the book could easily have been two or three times as large. How did you decide what to include?

I sought a mix of familiar suspects and fresh faces: I wanted the book to contain some surprises. I gave priority to contributors who were literary figures in their own right rather than academic critics because I wanted the book to reflect the ways in which writers have engaged Twain as a fellow writer. (“The difference between the almost right word & the right word,” Twain wrote, “is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)

Twain travelled more widely than virtually any other American author of his era, and his works travelled as well—both in English and in translatio —shaping world literature in unexpected ways in the process. I wanted the book to reflect that. To that end, I sought out work by respected writers published originally in Europe, Asia, and Latin America that had not previously been translated into English—including pieces by Cuba’s most famous public intellectual, by Nobel laureates from Denmark and Japan, by a famous Russian poet, etc.

Certain threads take the foreground—African-American writers commenting on Twain and race, for example. I wanted to include responses to the full range of Twain’s writings, not just Huckleberry Finn. I included pieces critical of Twain, as well as pieces that were appreciative. And finally, I sought a mix of genres: essays, letters, poetry, fiction, memoirs—and distinctive portraits of Twain by artists ranging from French surrealist Jean Cocteau to James Montgomery Flagg (of “Uncle Sam Wants You” fame) to Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and Wile E. Coyote) to contemporary artist Barry Moser.

What was new and distinctive about Twain’s writing?

Time and again Twain defied readers’ expectations, forging unforgettable narratives from materials that had not been the stuff of literature before. As William Dean Howells put it, “He saunters out into the trim world of letters, and lounges across its neatly kept paths, and walks about on the grass at will, in spite of all the signs that have been put up from the beginning of literature, warning people of dangers and penalties for the slightest trespass.”

From the breezy slang and deadpan humor that peppered his earliest comic sketches to the unmistakably American characters who populated his fiction, Twain’s writings introduced readers around the world to American personalities speaking in distinctively American cadences. H. L. Mencken wrote in the New York Evening Mail in 1917, “His humor was American. His incurable Philistinism was American. His very English was American. Above all, he was an American in his curious mixture of sentimentality and cynicism, his mingling of romanticist and iconoclast. [Emerson’s] English Traits might have been written by any one of half a dozen Germans. The tales of Poe, printed as translations from the French, would have deceived even Frenchmen.... But in Huckleberry Finn, in A Connecticut Yankee, and in most of the short sketches there is a quality that is unmistakably and overwhelmingly national. They belong to our country and our time quite as obviously as the skyscraper or the quick lunch counter.”

Sometimes writers outside the U.S. embraced the freshness of what Twain was doing with greater enthusiasm than Americans did. I found, for example, that the first book published anywhere, in any language, on Twain, was published in French in Paris in 1884 by a twenty-four-year-old Henry Gauthier-Villars (best known today for being the controversial first husband of the writer Colette). “Hello then, charming writer with no model or imitator!” Gauthier-Villars wrote. “I bid you welcome among us, newcomer with endless verve; the sound of the hurrahs you have raised has already crossed the ocean. We have been waiting for you... the cheerful Yankee with the ringing laugh, the inimitable Mark Twain!”

There seem to be many Mark Twains. In your book Lighting Out for the Territory you list some: “a funny man with a talent for literature of the low sort; a serious author who despaired of being tarred forever with the ‘humorist’ label; a satirist so subtle his meanings were often missed; a polemicist so direct his messages were often pointedly ignored.” Could you guide readers to the pieces in this anthology that celebrate the Twain they like best?

Readers interested in Twain as a humorist will enjoy G. K. Chesterton’s descriptions of the “mad logic” of his wit; Jesús Castellanos’ efforts to describe the “indeterminable and delicious something” in Twain’s “way of saying things precisely as they are not;” and Michael Blakemore’s comments on Twain as the author of a “play that makes audiences laugh so much they break the seats.” Twain’s review of his own book Innocents Abroad, published anonymously, is hilarious. (Casting himself in the persona of a humorless, literal-minded British reviewer Twain wrote, “That the book is a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind, is apparent on every page.”) Readers who care more about Twain’s social and political criticism will read with interest the essays by José Martí, Hamlin Garland, Lao She, and Roy Blount, Jr., among others, along with short comments by Booker T. Washington and Langston Hughes. Those who like their Twain serious and somber will find Theodore Dreiser’s discussion of Twain as a marvelously “gloomy and wholly mechanistic thinker” appealing.

For Twain as a titan of world literature, read W. H. Auden comparing Twain with Charles Dickens, or Maks Erik comparing Twain with both Dickens and Sholem Aleichem. Ángel Guerra and José Martí compare Twain with Cervantes; Jorge Luis Borges, with Ricardo Güiraldes and Rudyard Kipling. For the impact Twain had on children who would grow up to become prominent writers and artists, read the pieces by Marina Tsvetaeva, Grant Wood, Chuck Jones, David Bradley, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The index of Twain’s works at the back of the book will help any reader discover how many works the Anthology covers. Twain’s greatest hits are well represented with David Ross Locke, Thérèse Bentzon, JoséMartí, Eduard Engel, and Livia Bruni on The Innocents Abroad; David Bradley and E. L. Doctorow on Tom Sawyer; T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, Kenzaburo Oe, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison on Huckleberry Finn; and José Martí, Hamlin Garland, and Kurt Vonnegut on A Connecticut Yankee. But Twain’s less familiar works get their share too: William Dean Howells on Joan of Arc; Hal Holbrook on Letters from the Earth; Ursula K. Le Guin and Lu Xun on Eve’s Diary, Ralph Wiley on Tom Sawyer Abroad; David Bradley on “How to Tell a Story”; Erica Jong on “1601”; and Min Jin Lee on “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note” and “The $30,000 Bequest.”