In April, HarperStudio will publish Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished humorous pieces by the American master. Right now, an uncorrected galley of the entire book is on the publisher’s website.

When The New Yorker published one of these pieces, “The Privilege of the Grave,” in December, it mentioned the upcoming collection. Googling the title, I was led to HarperStudio’s site for the book, which contains a “PDF e-marketing kit.” Within this PDF file is a link to the entire book online (minus the new introduction and foreword).

The complete table of contents is below, followed by my review.

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Contents

Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book

Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture

Conversations with Satan

Jane Austen

The Force of “Suggestion”

The Privilege of the Grave

A Group of Servants

The Quarrel in the Strong-Box

Happy Memories of the Dental Chair

Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman

On Postage Rates on Authors’ Manuscript

The Missionary in World-Politics

The Undertaker’s Tale

The Music Box

The Grand Prix

The Devil’s Gate

The Snow-Shovelers

Professor Mahaffy on Equality

Interviewing the Interviewer

An Incident

The Jungle Discusses Man

I Rise to a Question of Privilege

Telegraph Dog

The American Press

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Review

Twenty-four “new” pieces from Mark Twain? Is today my birthday? Let’s open this unexpected present….

“Jane Austen” is an unrelenting takedown of the author of Pride and Prejudice, along the lines of Twain’s infamous “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which is one of the most vitriolic and crushing attacks that one canonical writer has ever launched on another. Of Austen, he writes:

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.

He then offers a devastating summary of each character in Sense and Sensibility. The piece ends abruptly and is probably unfinished. If it had been completed, it might have ranked with “Literary Offenses,” but Twain was just warming up.

From its title, “Conversations with Satan” promises to be a Letters From the Earth-style ribbing of religion. It starts out well. Satan - handsome and courtly, “aristocratically calm and self-possessed” - appears dressed as an Anglican Bishop, and tells Twain that he is one of the writer’s “most ardent and grateful admirers.” Of America, he deadpans: “I have not been there lately. I am not needed there.” Twain and Old Scratch are both smoking cigars, and this unfortunately leads Twain off the tracks - the rest of the piece is comprised of his thoughts about stogies (he hates Cuban cigars; most cigar snobs can’t tell the difference between an expensive one and a cheap one without the label; etc.). Satan is not mentioned again in this obviously unfinished piece.

“The Missionary in World-Politics” fulfills its promise of rapping religion on the knuckles. “I do not know why we respect missionaries,” Twain writes to the “Editor of the Times.”

Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

He continues: “History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government.”

But Twain’s self-effacing humor is present as well. In “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” he writes: “Yes, and when a man gets old he wants to explain his past. He calls it that; but as a rule what he really wants to do is to whitewash it. I don’t want to whitewash mine, for it doesn’t need it. I have kept it in that kind of repair all the time.”

He says of Oliver Wendell Holmes:

He was a good friend of mine, and wrote me a poem on my 50th birth-day. I plagiarized the dedication of one of his books and used it in the Innocents Abroad. I didn’t know I had plagiarized him, but a friend proved it to me. I told Dr. Holmes about it and it made us good friends. He said we were all plagiarists, consciously or unconsciously, one or the other. It made me feel good to be one or the other - but he didn’t say which.

“Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” recounts Twain’s first visit to a dentist, which happened when he was an adult needing a long, painful operation for Riggs’ disease. Being interested in the history of drugs, I was happy to see Twain perceptively describe his experience with chloroform, which was offered to him only after the operation had been going on for an hour:

The chloroform created a radical change; it made everything comfortable and pleasant. The pains were about as sharp as they had been before, but they rather seemed to be impersonal pains; pains that belonged to the community in general, including me, but not me particularly, not me any more than the others. So I did not care for them any longer; I do not care for a pain unless I can have it all to myself.

“The Undertaker’s Tale” is a short story about an undertaker’s family (named the Cadavers) in a small village. They’re having a tough time financially - no one is dying. The daughter tries to pep up her father: “Do you remember the time that not one person died in this village during twenty-eight days? Were you downcast? Did you show any bitterness? No - not one angry word escaped your lips. You hardly even betrayed annoyance.”

In “Interviewing the Interviewer,” Twain grovels before the “godlike” Charles A. Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, beseeching him to please impart his wisdom regarding journalistic success. Because Twain paid homage, Dana deigns to reveal the secrets of the newspaper trade, starting with:

The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation. Never let your paper go to press without a sensation. If you have none, make one. Seize upon the prominent events of the day, and clamor about them with a maniacal fury that shall compel attention. Vilify everything that is unpopular - harry it, hunt it, abuse it, without rhyme or reasons, so that you get a sensation out of it. Laud that which is popular - unless you feel sure that you can make it unpopular by attacking it. Hit every man that is down - never fail in this, for it is safe. Libel every man that can be ruined by it. Libel every prominent man who dare not soil his hands with touching you in return. But glorify all moneyed scum and give columns of worship unto the monuments they erect in honor of themselves, for moneyed men will not put up with abuse from small newspapers.

Everything we expect from Twain is here - acid satire, down-home charm, self-effacement, attacks on the powerful, gallows humor, political humor, droll travelogues and fables, and even some black dialect (in “The Snow-Shovelers”). It’s fantastic to see this material finally surface 99 years after the great one’s death, but why did it take so long? And when will we get to see the 500 or so other manuscripts that were unpublished when Twain died almost a century ago?

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.

From the essay “Jane Austen” by Mark Twain. Previously unpublished, it will be included in Who Is Mark Twain?, coming in April from HarperStudio. (For more information about the book, see “First look at new book of Twain’s unpublished writings.”)

I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

From “The Missionary in World-Politics” by Mark Twain. Previously unpublished, it will be included in Who Is Mark Twain?, coming in April from HarperStudio. (For more information about the book, see “First look at new book of Twain’s unpublished writings.”)

Mark Twain was utterly convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by the man named William Shakespeare. In his biography of Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine wrote:

Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”

Twain’s long essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” doesn’t so much argue for Bacon’s authorship as it blasts the idea that “the Stratford rustic” wrote the works.

In this 45-minute video, playwright and stage actor Keir Cutler, as Mark Twain, performs, interprets, and expands on the essay in this live performance. It really is devastating.

{Via The Scientific Indian}

So, late last year I read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Only Authoritiative Text Based on the Complete Original Manuscript (Mark Twain Library edition), and as always, Huck got me daydreaming about rafting down the Mississippi River. Of course, On the Road makes me want to jump in my car and take off across the country, and I still haven’t done that, so there’s no way my ass is going to float down the Mississip on a homeade raft. But still … I wondered how I’d go about it, if it’s still possible/legal, etc.

A couple of weeks later, I was reading Esquire (which is a much better magazine than you might think it is), and their profile of novelist John Wray had a single sentence - can you sense the synchronicity coming here? - that I had to immediately read over and over:

He promoted Canaan’s Tongue by using his $5,000 publicity budget to build a raft and float down the Mississippi, giving interviews and readings along the way.

After just a little Googling, I found this 2005 NY Times article written during Wray’s adventure:

The first night out was fitful, scary even. After putting in at Helena, Ark., the homemade raft got caught up in the wash of the massive towboats that surrounded it on the Mississippi. The craft bounced along in the inky black, and then searing beams of light from the towboats began to strafe it, the captains wanting to see what manner of contraption was before them. The ragtag crew slept in terrified shifts, dodging the tugs and avoiding a ledge formed by a dike that threatened to pitch them into the mud, water and mayhem.

Maybe I’ll just stay on land.

{Photo of John Wray on raft by Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times}

Twain’s irreverent, posthumously published Letters From the Earth is pretty well-known, and he gets in some passing shots at religion here and there in his canon, like early on in Huck, but his most uncompromising attack on religion doesn’t get much attention and is amazingly out of print.

I wrote about this in my anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, specifically in the further-reading guide, “Good Books.” Here ’tis:

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Homespun Blasphemy

“Reflections on Religion” by Mark Twain, from The Outrageous Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

America’s literary titan - Mark Twain (né, Samuel Clemens) - was largely unafraid to reveal and ridicule hypocrisy and stupidity with his legendary razor wit. Religion often felt the blade, but sometimes the results were so bloody that Clemens and his executors wouldn’t let the results be seen. Letters From the Earth - in which Satan’s commentary on humanity’s religious customs is the vehicle for irreverent but basically good-natured criticism - wasn’t published until 1962, fifty-two years after Clemens’ death. It’s been in print ever since.

The five short chapters on religion from his autobiography haven’t fared as well. Like Letters, the publication of these twenty-one pages - dictated in June 1906 - was blocked for decades. On the manuscript, Clemens wrote that they weren’t to be published until 2406, five centuries hence. In a letter to a friend, Clemens mentioned that he didn’t want them published until he’d been in the grave for 100 years. His executors complied for a long time, but his daughter Clara relented in 1960, and the five chapters were finally revealed to the world in the Hudson Review in 1963. Twenty-four more years would pass before they were published again, this time in The Outrageous Mark Twain, a collection containing other writings on religion, masturbation, and the legendary “1601,” a mock-Elizabethan story about a farting contest. Sadly, the anthology didn’t stay available for long, so the chapters are no longer in print. (Portions are included as an appendix in the slightly more recent The Bible According to Mark Twain (University of Georgia Press, 1995). Unlike most of Clemens’ work, the chapters are still under copyright. I approached the law firm handling his estate about reprinting them, but the cost was way beyond our means.)

Unlike Letters From the Earth, these chapters - collectively titled “Reflections on Religion” - are harsh. No gentle mocking here; Clemens took off the gloves and opened a can of whup-ass. Since these are the raw transcriptions of what he dictated to his secretary, they’re not as polished or organized as they would’ve been had Clemens prepared them for publication. Still, it’s a joy to see one of America’s most beloved writers take Christianity behind the woodshed.

He jumps right into the thick of things by attacking none other than God, accurately describing the despicable nature of the Old Testament’s supreme being, who is constantly murdering, mutilating, and otherwise viciously abusing humans. “It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.” He rails against the endless suffering that God continues to cause, saying that “we would detest and denounce any earthly father who should inflict upon his child a thousandth part of the pains and miseries and cruelties which God deals out to his children every day…” But as horrible as the Old Testament God is, Clemens writes, at least he’s consistent and forthright, whereas Jesus spoke of mercy and love yet also threatened people with eternal punishment and damnation. He healed a few people, fed a few people, yet refused to use his God-powers to heal and feed everybody.

The next chapter mainly concerns the fact that the Bible, as well as other sacred literature, plagiarizes earlier holy books and mythologies without admitting it. “Each in turn confiscates decayed old stage-properties from the others and with naïve confidence puts them forth as fresh new inspirations from on high.” Clemens mentions the ubiquitous flood stories but concentrates on gods born of virgins.

In chapter three, the old man rails against the bloody tactics of Russia, Britain, and Belgium, all having Christian governments at the time. After tangentially stating that “the Bible defiles all Protestant children,” Clemens looks into his crystal ball. He sees Christianity eventually going the way of all religions - fading away and being replaced by “another God and a stupider religion.”

Setting his sights once again on God in the following chapter, Clemens wonders how a supreme being can inflict such endless misery on all of his creatures. He scoffs at the notion of prayer, which he likens to begging. The originality of Clemens’ inquiries goes up a notch when he dismantles the excuses that preachers make for the suffering God puts us through - namely, that it helps us, elevates us, purifies us, and makes us worthy of heaven. If that’s so, he wonders, what about the suffering of animals, who experience violence, disease, hunger, and agonizing deaths in ways similar to, and often worse than, humans? No Bible-banger ever claims that “alligators [and] tigers” are being tested and strengthened so that they can earn a heavenly reward. And if God brutalizing his children is so wonderful, why don’t preachers recommend that parents do the same horrible things to their own children? Sure, they often say you shouldn’t spare the rod, but why not torture and starve your kids, purposely give them diseases, kill everyone they love, since these things build so much spiritual character?

Clemens uses his final chapter to ridicule the idea of heaven. “If King Leopold II, the Butcher, should proclaim that out of each hundred innocent and unoffending Congo Negroes he is going to save one from humiliation, starvation and assassination, and fetch that one home to Belgium to live with him in his palace and feed at his table, how many people would believe it?” Finally, turning his baleful gaze to the human race, Clemens unexpectedly softens:

I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it - it is like hitting a child. Man is not to blame for what he is…. He is flung head over heels into this world without ever a chance to decline, and straightaway he conceives and accepts the notion that he is in some mysterious way under obligations to the unknown Power that inflicted this outrage upon him…