4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Among His Own People, November 3, 2006
This review is from: Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism) (Hardcover)
He was 36 before he was first interviewed, and it took awhile for the logrolling to really get going, but then in his fifties and sixties interviewers came to him in droves. MARK TWAIN: THE COMPLETE INTERVIEWS is an amazing publishing project, I leave the details to the specialists. All the general public needs to know is that it is the funniest book to be published this year, and pound for pound, dollar for dollar, by far the best bargain of the year even at seventy-five dollars a pop. I advise you to stock up on this book for Christmas presents or what have you, or even just to see you through the long hard winter with a little bit of jollification at your fingertips.
Along the way, we meet not only Twain but dozens of newspapermen (and women) who wrote and interviewed in styles far different from today's cut and dried cut and paste. Thanks to The PARIS REVIEW and (in a slightly different vein) PLAYBOY, the literary interview has stultified in recent years into a completely stodgy genre, ripe with conventions and rigid with tropes. Reading this book, we are there for the birth of the interview, in which every journalist had a different idea of what an interview should be like. Some are nearly three act plays, some brief sonnets, some grim novellas, and others are like episodes of a proto-LAUGH IN. Nearly all of them bring Mark Twain to life as does nothing else, not even the autobiography.
You can tell he, a former newspaperman, believed in giving his brothers and sisters their money's worth. In one interview Clara (Mrs Samuel Clemens) ventures into the room and she is shocked to hear the tall tales coming out of her husband's mouth. "I think it would be better," she hints, "if your wife saw your interviews in print before they were published." This was before the invention of the tape recorder, of course, and it is especially amusing to hear three or four reporters' accounts of the same press conference--all of them "quoting" Twain purportedly verbatim, but none of "him" saying the same thing twice. I can't imagine the assiduity with which editor Scharnhorst must have had to track down all these items, but the multiple accounts is what really makes the project seem like living history.
We don't recognize the names of most of the reporters (many stories were filed anonymously) but now and then a famous name creeps in. The New York Herald commissions Rudyard Kipling, for example, during a visit of Kipling to New England, and has him attempt to track Twain down at his mother in law's house in Elmira (summer 1890).
The interviews increase as Twain, bankrupted by bad investments, undergoes heroic reading tours that span the globe, as he tries to pay off his investors. Eerily enough bankruptcy had earlier struck Twain's hero, Sir Walter Scott, who drove himself to the grave trying to make good his debts, and they were the same age--58--when this disaster struck. "If I have to pay my debts by writing books as Scott had to write them," he tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1895, "I might easily kill myself in five years as he did." Nearly every piece is funny, except when Twain's ragging on about the copyright issue he was so hepped on (and even there he's able to provoke a black humor, like that of Pudd'nhead Wilson) or when human injustice makes him dark with rage, as against Leopold II of Belgium. And yet the overall impression is of a man always on edge, whose performative genius renewed him again and again, and yet destroyed him eventually. His "Mark Twain"-ness turned into something of a shtick--the snowy white hair, the white cotton suits, the omnipresent cigar, even the femme fatale habit of receiving journalists in bed in his nightclothes--but in his insistence on maintaining a space for "trading lies" within a general framework of outrageous honesty, a coruscating, inventive wit still dazzles.
My favorite pieces? Twain grimly encountering ancient men who claim that they were the originals of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer as boys. Or his routine on how hotels keep plumbers' uniforms in basement lockers for their waiters to dress in when they pretend to be attending to plumbing problems in his suite.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Unexpected Great Find, July 28, 2009
This review is from: Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism) (Hardcover)
Firstly I chose this rare and scholarly volume because I never suspected Clemens' life would have had so many preserved interviews. Secondly I have Clemens on my shoulder as I celebrate my becoming a fascist target. There is no greater honor than attracting their attention, their knowing I am so important as to mobilize their cadres of slobbering, moronic operatives to vote against my reviews. I never expected such an honor. I bathe in their hatred for me, but I grieve for my country they hate more than they hate me. Each negative is a medal on my breast. Keep 'em coming ye droolers. They never leave their names as is common with the cowardice of wingnuts, both because they cannot read and cannot write. Good with a gun, if it is an automatic. Their wives have to teach them how to tie a noose.
Rather rule a sewer than bear equality in paradise.
So on to business. I salute University of Alabama Press for publishing this fine work in typical, beautiful Southern Linen boards. Classy, no? Scharnhorst is as formidable an editor as his eponymous warship. Next, I applaud their ANSI Z 39.48-1984 standard certification. You rarely see such care to paper preservation standards. Scharnhorst rightly dedicated this book to Louis J. Budd, a Twain scholar of some considerable regard.
Imagine a century ago, Twain's disembarking into a "gaggle" of fifteen reporters on his pier, returning to New York. That is four or five cities' papers making sure they were not scooped.
There are ample references to former President and former Lieutenant General (first since Washington) Grant. Clemens was his neighbor on 10th Street Manhattan, and then his friend and editor. Clemens was secondarily responsible for Grant's excellent memoirs. He saw his friend upstate New York through throat cancer and made sure we had Grant's treasure. Some 19 references here. The notes are exemplary.
I cannot help but add that Grant was invited by Bismarck to Prussia. He wanted meet the man who invented modern warfare. Bismarck directly credited Grant for the outcome of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Bismarck had studied Grant's campaigns and appreciated Grant's emphasis on logistics, river, road and supremely, rail.
For us who read his novels, stories and essays, we now have an important missing piece of this public figure.
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