Close encounters with Mark Twain

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Close encounters with Mark Twain

In Rudyard Kipling, says Craig Brown, Twain found an admirer. In Helen Keller, he felt the presence of God

POSTED ON NOVEMBER 25, 2012, AT 2:40 PM

American writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. Photo: Rischgitz/Getty Images

IN 1889, RUDYARD KIPLING is 23 years old, though he looks closer to 40. He arrives in San Francisco on May 28, after a 20-day voyage from Japan. He is greedy for life. He witnesses a gunfight in Chinatown, lands a 12-pound salmon in Oregon, meets cowboys in Montana, is appalled by Chicago, and falls in love with his future wife in Beaver, north Pennsylvania.

Before he leaves the United States, he is determined to meet his hero, Mark Twain. He goes on a wild-goose chase—to Buffalo, then Toronto, then Boston—before tracking him down to Elmira, N.Y., in June, where a policeman tells him he spotted Twain, "or someone very like him," driving a buggy through town the day before. "He lives out yonder at East Hill, three miles from here."

At East Hill, he is informed that Twain is downtown, at the home of his brother-in-law, Gen. Charles J. Langdon. He finds the house and rings the doorbell, but then has second thoughts. "It occurred to me for the first time that Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India."

He is led into a big, dark drawing room. There, in a huge chair, he finds the 53-year-old author of Tom Sawyer with "a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world…I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk—this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away."

Kipling is transfixed. "That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a 12-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal."

The two men discuss the difficulties of copyright before moving on to Twain's work. "Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher's daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man."

Twain gets up, fills his pipe, and paces the room in his bedroom slippers. "I haven't decided. I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice."

Kipling raises a voice of protest: To him, Tom Sawyer is real.

"Oh, he is real," says Twain. "He's all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book, because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and 20 years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel."

Twain laughs. They move on to autobiography. "I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself," Twain says. "I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine—a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions, a man who wouldn't dream of telling a lie—and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine…good, honest man that he was, in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself."

TWAIN TALKS OF the books he likes to read. "I never cared for fiction or storybooks. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now, for instance, before you came in, I was reading an article about mathematics. Perfectly pure mathematics. My own knowledge of mathematics stops at 12 times 12, but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn't understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful."

After two hours, the interview comes to an end. The great man, who never minds talking, assures his disciple that he has not interrupted him in the least.

Seventeen years on, Rudyard Kipling is world famous. Twain grows nostalgic for the time he spent in his company. "I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and he knew I knew less than any person he had met before.… When he was gone, Mr. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said, 'He is a stranger to me but is a most remarkable man—and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.'"

Twain, now age 70, is addicted to Kipling's works. He rereads Kim every year, "and in this way I go back to India without fatigue.… I am not acquainted with my own books, but I know Kipling's books. They never grow pale to me; they keep their color; they are always fresh."

The worshipped has become the worshipper.

AS HELEN KELLER'S carriage draws up between the huge granite pillars of Mark Twain's house in Stormfield, Conn., the most venerable author in America is there to greet her, though she can neither see him nor hear him. Her companion Annie Sullivan—her eyes and ears—tells Helen that he is all in white, his beautiful white hair glistening in the afternoon sunshine "like the snow spray on gray stones."

It is February 1909. Twain and Keller first met 15 years ago, when he was 58 and she was just 14. Struck deaf and blind by meningitis at the age of 18 months, Helen had, through sheer force of will, discovered a way to communicate: She finds out what people are saying by placing her fingers on their lips, throat, and nose, or by having Annie transpose it onto the palm of her hand in letters of the alphabet.

Taken up as a prodigy by the great and the good, she formed a special friendship with Twain. "The instant I clasped his hand in mine, I knew that he was my friend. He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips.… He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones—things that others learned slowly or not at all. He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark."

Unlike other people, Twain never patronized her. "He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do. He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses. He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him."

For his part, Twain is in awe. "She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today." Shortly after their first meeting, Twain formed a circle to fund her education at Radcliffe College, which led to her publishing an autobiography at the age of 22, which in turn led her to become almost as celebrated as Twain himself.

But the intervening years have struck Twain some heavy blows. One of his daughters, Susy, has died of meningitis, another of an epileptic fit in a bathtub, and his wife, Livy, has died of heart disease. Throughout Helen's stay he acts his familiar bluff, entertaining old self, but she senses the deep sadness within.

"There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind—a gesture of the soul rather than of the face."

BUT FOR THE moment, he welcomes them into the house for tea and buttered toast by the fire. Then he shows them around. They go upstairs to see his bedroom. "Try to picture, Helen, what we are seeing out of these windows. We are high up on a snow-covered hill. Beyond are dense spruce and fir woods, other snow-clad hills, and stone walls intersecting the landscape everywhere, and, over all, the white wizardry of winter. It is a delight, this wild, free, fir-scented place."

He shows the two women to their suite. On the mantelpiece there is a card telling burglars where to find everything of value. There has recently been a burglary, Twain explains, and this notice will ensure that any future intruders do not bother to disturb him.

Over dinner, Twain holds forth, "his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity." 

Dinner comes to an end, but "his talk continues around the fire," says Helen. "He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say, like the river, 'Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.'"

Before Helen leaves Stormfield, Twain is more solemn. "I am very lonely, sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my friends have departed. My thoughts trail away into the past. I think of Livy and Susy and I seem to be fumbling in the dark folds of confused dreams."

As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood; it has burned down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming toward her. "I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, 'Please don't grieve.'"

She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. "It always seems to say the same thing to me, 'Please don't grieve.' But I grieve, nevertheless."

 

---

From Hello Goodbye Hello, by Craig Brown. ©2011 by Craig Brown. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Author Jeremy Hodges Claims Robert Louis Stevenson Died From Syphilis

The new biography of the famous novelist and poet, Robert Louis Stevenson, is a testament to the fact that the disease can cause death after a period of a few years.

 The Scottish Daily Record, which is an online news source, uploaded an article about the world famous Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson. The article stated, “A NEW biography of Robert Louis Stevenson claims that the writer died at just 44 after catching syphilis from an Edinburgh prostitute.”
Robert Louis Stevenson is well known around the world because of his works like Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is one of the few authors whose novels have been translated into many different languages around the globe. It has been common belief till now that the author died at the age of 44 due to Tuberculosis. However, his new biography written by James Hodges challenges that and states he died from Syphilis instead.
Hodges, in his book, claims that the author contracted the sexually transmitted disease at the age of 22 from a prostitute in Edinburgh. He died 22 years later when the disease reached its last stage. The proof lies in the letter that he’d written to his friend and financial agent, Charles Baxter, and in the excerpts from his mother’s diary. “That walk down Queen Street has made a fine sore of my burning and here I am,” is a sentence from the letter to Baxter which may be pointing out where he had met the prostitute.

Rare Robert Louis Stevenson letter could fetch £8,000

FROM THE SCOTSMAN

By George Mair

A "LOST" letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to the English-born governor of Fiji, who had threatened to deport the Scot from his Samoan home, is set to fetch thousands of pounds at auction next week.

The Treasure Island novelist wrote the recently rediscovered letter on 27 December, 1893, a year before his death at the age of 44.

An internationally known literary figure, he had settled in the South Seas in search of a climate more suited to his delicate health than that of his native Edinburgh.

He became embroiled in local politics, and championed the cause of the people of the Western Pacific against European exploitation and administrative incompetence.

In 1892, Stevenson fired off a series of satirical letters to the Times newspaper, causing diplomatic problems for Sir John Thurston, the governor of Fiji and high commissioner for the Western Pacific, who even threatened to deport him.

Sir John, one of the founders of modern Fiji, later offered an olive branch and invited the writer to stay with him in Fiji. In reply, Stevenson elegantly buried the hatchet and reciprocated the invitation to stay.

But the two men never met, as Stevenson died from a suspected brain haemorrhage in early December 1894.

The Scot's letter to Sir John is to be sold by an anonymous collector at Bonhams' sale of printed books and manuscripts in London on Tuesday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000.

Bonhams spokesman Andrew Currie said yesterday: "Though the dispute between the two men is well documented, this remarkable letter was previously unknown, and does not appear in any of the collections of Stevenson's letters.

"This letter effectively buries the hatchet between Stevenson and Sir John, whose instincts about the welfare of the Pacific islanders were very similar but who got on the wrong side of each other when Stevenson's well-intentioned interference threatened to derail Sir John's carefully constructed diplomatic position."

Stevenson addressed his letter to "His Excellency, Sir John Bates Thurston, KCMG Fiji" and clearly sought to make amends.

He wrote: "It appears we are both equally satisfied with the new text of the ordnance; and that we may congratulate each other on the end of our momentary opposition".

He also extends an invitation to Sir John to visit him at Vailima, his home on Samoa, adding: "I shall not fail to avail myself of your kind offer, should I visit Fiji; and per contra, I press your cordiality to make use of my house should you return to Samoa.

"I believe you could enjoy as much comfort there as anywhere, and I know we can afford you better air."

The lot includes an 1894 letter to Sir John from Stevenson in which he introduces his cousin Graham Balfour and compliments the governor on his "successful government of Fiji".

Rare Edward Ardizzone illustrations of Huckleberry Finn rediscovered

Pen and ink drawings for 1961 edition surface in publisher's study
Alison Flood guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 May 2011 16

An extremely rare collection of drawings by the much-loved children's illustrator Edward Ardizzone for Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been discovered in a publisher's study. The daughters of the late Anthony Beal, chairman of Heinemann Education and founder of the progressive New Windmill series of books, were clearing out their father's study when they stumbled across the complete set of 37 drawings. First published in 1961, the pen and ink pictures are currently being displayed at the Illustration Cupboard gallery.

"We knew Ardizzone had been a friend of dad's from his publishing days," said Kate Beal. "We came across this folder of amazing illustrations. Dad was a real hoarder and kept everything ... We decided to have this exhibition of the pictures; it's nice because it celebrates dad's work as well."

Beal is best known for his development of the New Windmill series, devised by children's author Ian Serraillier and his wife Anne. The books brought more modern, popular novels – including the edition of Huck Finn illustrated by Ardizzone – to children across Britain, the Commonwealth and Africa who had previously been fed a diet of a particular kind of 19th-century classic. "In the 1960s and 1970s it was a way of bringing classics to kids, making them more kid-friendly," said Beal. "Nowadays we wouldn't find [the Ardizzone illustrations] very child-friendly, but when they were drawn they were – a lot of kids' books didn't have illustrations in them at all."

Born in 1900, Ardizzone won the Kate Greenaway medal for his own picture book, Tim All Alone, but his watercolours and line drawings also illustrated the works of other writers, from a host of books by Eleanor Farjeon to Clive King's Stig of the Dump, Philippa Pearce's Minnow on the Say and Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales. Awarded the CBE in 1971, he died in 1979.

The Huck Finn illustrations show how, when Ardizzone made errors, he drew on top of the mistake rather than starting again; they also give an insight into the portrayal of blacks in America at the time, said Beal. "It's slightly embarrassing – they're a bit like the way black people are portrayed in Gone with the Wind," she said. "You wouldn't get away with that now. I work for a children's publisher and we are really careful about how we make our books portray people. These illustrations would not pass our criteria these days. But they were done in an innocent way; they are not meant to be racist."

Mark Twain , l'écrivain et ses doubles

FROM LE FIGARO
Par Christophe Mercier
Le maître américain avait consacré les dernières années de sa vie à un roman passionnant, enfin traduit.

Interrogé sur les racines de son œuvre, William Faulkner déclara un jour que tout le roman américain du XXe siècle sortait des Aventures de ­Huckleberry Finn, et que Mark Twain était le père de la littérature américaine.

En France, Huckleberry Finn (1885) est moins connu que Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer (1876), et les deux livres ont longtemps été considérés comme de simples «livres pour enfants». Il est vrai que les deux romans sont difficilement traduisibles, que le jeu sur la langue et, surtout, sur les accents, sont impossibles à rendre en ­français.

Bernard Hoepffner, qui a déjà tenté la gageure de retraduire les deux romans les plus célèbres de Twain, nous donne aujourd'hui celle de N° 44, le mystérieux étranger, l'ultime roman de l'écrivain. Il y a travaillé pendant les douze dernières années de sa vie, et l'a laissé inédit (mais non pas inachevé).

Jeu de miroirs
Aux États-Unis, ce n'est que depuis 1969, et la version intégrale publiée par les Presses universitaires de Californie, qu'on peut lire le texte tel que Twain l'avait voulu, les éditions antérieures (la première date de 1916, six ans après la mort de l'auteur) résultant d'un montage qui mêlait au roman des passages d'autres récits inédits, et infligeait au texte des coupes sévères.

Qu'est-ce que ce livre au titre obscur? Au premier abord, un roman qui semble un récapitulatif des personnages, des décors et des thèmes de Twain: deux héros adolescents, dans l'Europe du Moyen Age, confrontés à la cruauté du monde : on se croirait dans une variante du Prince et le Pauvre, dans lequel l'Angleterre médiévale aurait fait place à un village autrichien, en 1490. La scène se situe dans un château à moitié abandonné, colonisé par une communauté constituée par un imprimeur, sa famille et ses ouvriers, et un magicien. Leur existence est bouleversée par l'arrivée d'un adolescent en haillons, d'une beauté surnaturelle, qui dit s'appeler N° 44. Il devient le souffre-douleur de tous, et a pour seul ami August, le narrateur de seize ans, qui va le voir la nuit, en cachette, et apprend peu à peu une partie de ses secrets et de ses pouvoirs. Quand les ouvriers se mettent en grève, et que N° 44, afin que le travail continue, donne corps à leurs Duplicata, tout se complique.

Le thème du double, omniprésent chez Twain, et magistralement exploité dans Pudden'head Wilson (1894), son chef-d'œuvre méconnu, est au centre de N° 44, mais poussé à la puissance 10. Les Doubles se multiplient, comme en un fantastique jeu de miroirs, et Twain lui-même semble perdre le contrôle de ces machines devenues folles, comme les horloges qui, à la fin du livre, se mettent à remonter le temps.

Lumière d'apocalypse
Le pessimisme de Twain quant à la nature humaine, son humour noir habituel, font place à un nihilisme absolu, qui baigne les dernières pages du livre, après une magnifique scène d'un bal de squelettes, d'une lumière d'apocalypse: « Il n'y a pas de Dieu, pas d'Univers, pas de vie terrestre, pas de paradis, pas d'enfer. Tout cela n'est qu'un rêve, un rêve grotesque et imbécile.»

La noirceur du livre trouve sans doute sa source dans la période tragique que vit Twain: quand il commence N° 44, en 1898, l'ancien reporter du Missouri Courrier, l'ancien pilote de «steamboat» sur le Mississippi, l'ancien prospecteur du Wild West, après un quart de siècle de gloire littéraire et de bonheur familial, fait l'expérience du malheur: maladie et mort de sa femme, mort soudaine de l'aînée de ses filles, grave dépression de la cadette, crises d'épilepsie de la plus jeune. Le monde se dépeuple autour de lui et, dans sa grande maison new-yorkaise de la Cinquième Avenue, il découvre la solitude.

Il ne publie plus rien, se consacre à N° 44 et à son Autobiographie (dont la version intégrale est sortie récemment en Amérique), qu'il achève par un texte écrit au lendemain de la mort de sa plus jeune fille, le matin de Noël 1909. Dès lors, il pose définitivement la plume, et meurt six mois plus tard…

Il laisse deux testaments: son Autobiographie et ce N° 44 , le plus fou et le plus opaque de ses romans, imparfait et passionnant, dont on n'a pas fini d'interroger les mystères.

N° 44, le mystérieux étranger de Mark Twain, traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Bernard Hoepffner, Tristram, 280 p., 20 €.

exclusive Found: Louis Stevenson’s missing masterpiece

FROM HERALD SCOTLAND

Lost novel finished in French. By Arts Correspondent Edd McCracken


More than 130 years after it was started, Robert Louis Stevenson’s abandoned first novel has been found, completed and poised to be published for the first time.

And fittingly for Scotland’s most international writer, not only was it finished after a transcontinental search for the original manuscript, stretching from Brittany to California, but it will make its print début in French.

Before the swashbuckling Kidnapped, before the sinister The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there was The Hair Trunk. Begun in 1877 when Stevenson was only 27 years old, The Hair Trunk was supposed to be the definitive novel of the bohemian age, drawing on his time in artists’ colonies in France.

However, within two years he had abandoned it. His first official novel, Treasure Island, would only appear in 1883.

The Hair Trunk has lain incomplete since then, considered a mere juvenile curio by Stevenson scholars. Few were aware of it. Even fewer have read it. It existed only on 140 parched pages in an American library.

That is, until now. French author and Stevenson scholar Michel Le Bris, 66, has rescued and completed the novel as part of a two-decade labour of love. “We are watching the birth of Stevenson the novelist here,” he said from his home in Brittany. “I think it shows wonderful invention.”

The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth, to give it its full name, will be published in France next month by Gallimard. Of its 300 pages, Stevenson provides the first nine chapters, Le Bris the final seven.

The story concerns a group of young Cambridge students who decide to leave England to build a world more in tune with their bohemian philosophy. Where the mysterious hair trunk of the title – an oversized wooden chest – fits in, is unclear.

In a letter from 1877, in which Stevenson describes the novel as both absurd and very funny, he reveals the trunk “is the fun of it – everybody steals it”. As the students attempt to set up their ideal society they encounter sea battles, thievery, tempests, and the discovery of a desert island off the west coast of Scotland.

Stevenson began writing the novel at the same time as the New Arabian Nights, his first collection of short stories. However, he abandoned The Hair Trunk following an arduous trip to America and his marriage to Fanny Osbourne. It was a period of his life that transformed him deeply.

“This dramatic period abroad, where he was abandoned by almost everyone, came to be his farewell to his years of bohemia,” said Le Bris. “Once he came back to Europe there seemed to be no sense in continuing to write a novel, which was meant to be a novel of the bohemian age, whatever its literary merit. He had moved on.”

The story of the novel’s resurrection and completion began in 1990. Le Bris was working on a biography of Stevenson’s early years when he came upon a reference to The Hair Trunk on a microfilm of letters to his friend Fanny Sitwell. Upon further investigation he discovered an eight-page rough draft was kept in the Beinecke Library at Yale University in the US.

From there Le Bris found 140 pages of the manuscript had been sold by the Anderson Auction Company in January 1915 for $1400 to a collector of rare books, George D Smith. Smith in turn sold the pages to the Huntington Library in California, where Le Bris finally found it. “It was an unforgettable feeling,” he said.

With two thirds of the novel completed, Le Bris spent two decades attempting to resolve it. He has written several books on Stevenson and translated scores of his essays, travel writing and short stories.

Le Bris argues that Stevenson is appreciated more in France than in his native Scotland. There are more works by the Edinburgh author published in French than in English.

‘‘How is it that in 2011 Stevenson’s entire work has not yet been published in English? Why is there no current edition of The Wrong Box, revised and corrected by Stevenson, available in English? Graham Greene was already calling for it in 1950! The truth is Stevenson has been hailed as a genius by the greatest, but mostly foreign, writers: Henry James, Jorge Luis Borgès, Octavio Paz, Hermann Hesse, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Italo Calvino. The truth is America made him famous with the publication of Dr Jekyll, not Great Britain.”

The upcoming publication of The Hair Trunk has been broadly welcomed by Stevenson scholars.

Dr Penny Fielding is a general editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She said: ‘‘I’m very pleased to hear that this early work will now be published in French,” she said. “The Hair Trunk was started when the young Stevenson was trying to work out what kind of author he wanted to be.”

Sunday Herald columnist Ian Bell wrote Dreams of Exile, a celebrated biography of Stevenson, in 1993. He congratulated Le Bris’s enterprise, but had doubts over The Hair Trunk’s quality. “Michel is perfectly entitled to make what can be made of Lou’s leavings,” he said. “But they are leavings or, in the pompous description, juvenilia.

“Le Bris makes one good point, though. The French do have a bit of a thing for our Louis. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if there is more Robert Louis Stevenson in print in France than here. And what does that say about us?”

There are no plans to publish Le Bris’s version of The Hair Trunk in English. He will, however, travel to Edinburgh in May for an event at the city’s French Institute.

Le Bris is also the director of the book festival Etonnants Voyageurs in the Breton town of Saint-Malo. As part of the French Institute’s year of cultural exchange, several Scottish authors will be appearing there in June.


Thanks to staff at the French Institute for their help in translation.

Invisible Ink: No 67 - Robert Louis Stevenson

FROM THE INDEPENDENT
By Christopher Fowler
Yes, we know you had a tattered copy of Treasure Island in your schoolbag when you were 10, you're aware of Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but did you know that the best part of Robert Louis Stevenson's career is now the least remembered?

The range and complexity of his short fiction is extraordinary. Although he is known for the graceful construction of his plots, he was also a champion of literary style throughout his life. As a child, one of Stevenson's favourite books had been the Arabian Nights, so he wrote the New Arabian Nights (1882), which featured two interlinking sets of tales, "The Suicide Club" and "The Rajah's Diamond". In them, the dashing Prince Florizel and his sidekick Colonel Geraldine leave their Rupert Street abode and hop into hansoms, setting off on nocturnal adventures involving secret societies and sinister plots to overthrow order.

You can trace this macabre strand of Stevenson's writing to his reckless student life in Edinburgh, which brings us to the Conan Doyle question: why is Sherlock Holmes so ubiquitous while Stevenson's hero is forgotten? Well, there's the matter of quantity. After all, we have 56 Sherlock stories and four novels from Conan Doyle. But we even tend to recall Stevenson's better-known tales wrongly. Mr Hyde, for example, is no physical monster but rather has the spiritual malignance of Dorian Gray, and the antidote he needs lies in the warmth of human relationships.

Stevenson cherished lasting friendships and found in them the solution to most human malaises. The characters in his darker tales, such as those in "Markheim" and "Thrawn Janet", are lonely and loveless. His later exotic fables were inspired by his South Seas travels, and "The Bottle Imp" is the best genie story ever, partly because of the dilemma the bottle imposes on an owner, for it must be sold on for less than was paid for it.

Stevenson's stories may have been overlooked by modern readers, but not by other authors. His influence can be seen in the works of Kipling, Hemingway, Nabokov, J M Barrie, Arthur Machen and G K Chesterton. He was a literary superstar in his short lifetime, but it didn't guarantee immortality for what is some of his best work. Tartarus Press reissued The Suicide Club & Other Dark Adventures in a handsome hardback in 2004, although unhappily this edition is now out of print

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Mark Twain’s Riverboat Ramblings

FROM NYTIMES
By GARRISON KEILLOR
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

Samuel L. Clemens was a cheerful promoter of himself, and even after he’d retired from the lecture circuit, the old man liked to dress up as Mark Twain in a fresh white suit and take a Sunday morning stroll up Fifth Avenue just as churches were letting out and see the heads turn and hear his name murmured, the crowds of Presbyterians and Episcopalians standing awe-struck as the most beloved mustache in America passed by, tipping his silk hat to the ladies. Mr. Twain’s autobiography was meant to be a last stroll around the block, and to build up suspense and improve sales, Sam told everybody that he was writing one and that it contained material so explosive it would need to be embargoed for a hundred years. That century has passed now and here it is, Volume 1 of “The Complete Authentic Unexpurgated Edition, Nothing Has Been Omitted, Not Even Scandalous Passages Likely to Cause Grown Men to Gasp and Women to Collapse in Tears — No Children Under 7 Allowed to Read This Book Under Any Circumstance,” which made Sam front-page news when all three volumes of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” were announced last spring. The book turns out to be a wonderful fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin in their Shakespearean romp, and bravo to Samuel Clemens, still able to catch the public’s attention a century after he expired.

He speaks from the grave, he writes, so that he can speak freely — “as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter” — but there’s precious little frankness and freedom here and plenty of proof that Mark Twain, in the hands of academics, can be just as tedious as anybody else when he is under the burden of his own reputation. Here, sandwiched between a 58-page barrage of an introduction and 180 pages of footnotes, is a ragbag of scraps, some of interest, most of them not: travel notes, the dictated reminiscences of an old man in a dithery voice (“Shortly after my marriage, in 1870, I received a letter from a young man in St. Louis who was possibly a distant relative of mine — I don’t remember now about that” begins one story that goes nowhere), various false starts, anecdotes that must have been amusing at one time, a rough essay (with the author’s revisions carefully delineated) on Joan of Arc, a critique of the lecture performance of Petroleum V. Nasby, a recap of the clipper ship Hornet’s ill-fated voyage that ended in Hawaii in 1866, a piece about German compound words, an account of medicine on the frontier, well-worn passages from lectures, a fair amount of self-congratulation (“I expected the speech to go off well — and it did”), a detailed report on the testimony of Henry H. Rogers in a lawsuit in Boston, newspaper clippings, generous quotations from his daughter Susy’s writing about her father (“He always walks up and down the room while thinking and between each course at meals”), ruminations on his methodology of autobiographicizing (“I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted; . . . a complete and purposed jumble”), recollections of Reuel Gridley and other Hannibal classmates, and there is precious little that could be considered scandalous — maybe a rant against James W. Paige, the inventor of a typesetting machine that Sam lost $170,000 on: “If I had his nuts in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died” — but you have to wade through 18 pages of mind-numbing inventory of the Countess Massiglia’s Villa di Quarto, which he leased in Florence (“I shall go into the details of this house, not because I imagine it differs much from any other old-time palace or new-time palace on the continent of Europe, but because ­every one of its crazy details interests me, and therefore may be expected to interest others of the human race, particularly women”), the only point of which is that the man can afford to rent a palace that is fancier than anything you’d find in Missouri. His wife is dying, and he compiles an inventory of furniture.

Here is a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers — you’d like to be remembered for “The Innocents Abroad” and “Life on the Mississippi” and the first two-thirds of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and not for excruciating passages of hero worship of General Grant and his son Fred and accounts of your proximity to the general and your business dealings as the publisher of his memoirs, which only reminds the reader that the general wrote a classic autobiography, and you tried to and could not.

Think twice about donating your papers to an institution of higher learning, Famous Writer: someday they may be used against you.

Olivia Clemens’s nickname for her husband was Youth, and she knew him up close. Boyish high jinks are his strong suit, and energetic high spirits and sly irreverence. Here is Sam Clemens at 14 dancing naked in a room, unaware that girls are watching from behind a screen — well, he said he was unaware anyway, and why not take his word for it? — and the story of Jim Wolf climbing half-naked up the roof to silence the cats, and Sam tricking his mother into putting her hand in his jacket pocket, where he had stuffed a dead bat. Even in his maturity, he could take an appreciative boy’s view of his neighbor, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”:

“Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. . . . Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.”

Mark Twain sprang to life at a young age. His voice is clear when Samuel Clemens was 17 and got to New York and wrote to his mother on Aug. 24, 1853: “My Dear Mother: you will doubtless be a little surprised, and somewhat angry when you receive this, and find me so far from home; but you must bear a little with me, for you know I was always the best boy you had, and perhaps you remember the people used to say to their children — ‘Now don’t do like Orion and Henry Clemens but take Sam for your guide!’ ” He took lodging on Duane Street near Broadway and got a job setting type in a large printing shop near the East River. He stuck around the city for a couple of months and wrote home about the fruit market, the Wild Men of Borneo displayed in P. T. Barnum’s museum on Broadway, the Crystal Palace on 42nd Street, and, knowing the letters would appear in his brother Orion’s Hannibal Journal, the boy struck up a style that we recognize as Twain (“I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave, I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. It is just as hard on my conscience to leave New York as it was easy to leave Hannibal. I think I shall get off Tuesday, though”), a style that makes him seem fresh and friendly a century later. This is the Mark Twain people love to quote (“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way”), and whenever he hits his stride in the “Autobiography,” you feel happy for him — e.g., writing about Virginia City, Nev., in 1863:

“I secured a place in a nearby quartz mill to screen sand with a long-handled shovel. I hate a long-handled shovel. I never could learn to swing it properly. As often as any other way the sand didn’t reach the screen at all, but went over my head and down my back, inside of my clothes. It was the most detestable work I have ever engaged in, but it paid ten dollars a week and board — and the board was worthwhile, because it consisted not only of bacon, beans, coffee, bread and molasses, but we had stewed dried apples every day in the week just the same as if it were Sunday. But this palatial life, this gross and luxurious life, had to come to an end, and there were two sufficient reasons for it. On my side, I could not endure the heavy labor; and on the Company’s side, they did not feel justified in paying me to shovel sand down my back; so I was discharged just at the moment that I was going to resign.”

The reader hikes across the hard, dusty ground of a famous man’s reminiscences and is delighted to come across the occasional water hole. The famous man is in Berlin, hobnobbing with aristocracy at dinner at the ambassador’s, and meets a count: “This nobleman was of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get a chance to work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual.” And this leads to a story about a Clemens ancestor running for office in Virginia whose opponent sent six young men with drums to stand in front of Mr. Clemens’s platform and drum during his speech. Mr. Clemens stood up and took out a revolver and spoke, softly: “I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play on them, don’t stand behind them.”

Twain takes a good swing at John D. Rockefeller, that monster of greed and ambition who liked to give little talks to his Baptist church about the beauty of holi­ness and following in the footsteps of the Master who alone can satisfy our hearts (“Satan, twaddling sentimental sillinesses to a Sunday school, could be no burlesque upon John D. Rockefeller. . . . He can’t be burlesqued — he is himself a burlesque”), and he preaches well against imperialism, but then you must hear about Robert Louis Stevenson (“His splendid eyes . . . burned with a smoldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful”) and the meeting with Helen Keller, who laughed at Sam’s jokes, the meeting with Lewis Carroll (“He was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except ‘Uncle Remus’ ”), and then you start turning the pages two and three at a time.

Sam intended to give us an unblushing autobiography on the order of Casanova’s or Rousseau’s “Confessions” or Samuel Pepys’s diary, which Sam heartily admired, with its matter-of-fact inventories of parties attended and meals enjoyed and the skirts of chambermaids raised, but he knew that frankness comes with a price — “None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned,” he said. “The man has yet to be born who could write the truth about himself” — and when he describes his brother Orion as having “an intense lust for approval,” he is surely describing himself: “He was so eager to be approved, so girlishly anxious to be approved by anybody and every­body, without discrimination, that he was commonly ready to forsake his . . . convictions at a moment’s notice. . . . He never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.” The younger brother sees the older with a clear satirical eye, and what he sees is himself. Orion was foolish about money and so was Sam, a spendthrift to the end. Their father, Judge Clemens, before Sam was born, bought 75,000 acres of land in Tennessee. It contained coal, copper, iron, timber, oil, and produced wild grapes — “There’s millions in it!” said a cousin, James Lampton — and “it influenced our life,” Sam writes, it “cheered us up, and said ‘Do not be afraid — trust in me — wait.’ It kept us hoping and hoping, during 40 years, and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us — dreamers, and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year.” When their father died, “we began to manage it ourselves, . . . managed it all away except 10,000 acres,” which Orion traded for a house and a lot worth $250. The only one to turn a profit was Mark Twain, who turned Mr. Lampton (“the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-­breeding imagination”) into Colonel Sel­lers in “The Gilded Age.”

It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair. “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” There is very little real feeling here and no volcanic fires until you come upon the account of the death of his daughter Susy, 24, in Hartford, of meningitis, on Aug. 18, 1896. It is agony to read. Susy took ill and was taken to the house in Hartford, the home of her childhood, where she once wrote: “We are a very happy family. We consist of Papa, Mamma, Jean, Clara and me.” Her mother and Clara set sail from England to be with her. Her sister Jean and an aunt and uncle and some servants and the minister Joseph Twichell were at the bedside. Meningitis set in on the 15th. She ate her last supper that evening. The next morning, a high fever and delirium. She mistook a gown hanging in the closet for her mother and clutched it, kissed it and wept. She went blind. She stroked the face of Katy Leary, the housemaid, and said her last word, “Mamma.”

The father writes, “How gracious it was that in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that beautiful illusion . . . and the latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear imagined presence.” Susy was unconscious for two days and died on a Tuesday at 7 p.m. — “she that had been our wonder and our worship.” Sam was in England when he got a cablegram on Aug. 18 that said, “Susy was peacefully released today.” (“It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live. . . . The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. . . . It will be years” before he truly knows “the magnitude of his disaster.”)

Of all the cruel deaths in the book — the death of Sam’s father just when prosperity seemed to be in his grasp; the death of his younger brother, Henry, when boilers burst on a steamboat in 1858 (Henry, who had taken a job on the boat at Sam’s urging); the death of the infant son Langdon Clemens, for which Sam felt responsible — the death of the beloved daughter far beyond her father’s love and care is a disaster from which there is no recovery. Boyishness cannot prevail, nor irreverence. The story can’t be written. The man buttons up his clothes and resigns himself to the inexpressible.


Garrison Keillor is the host of “A Prairie Home Companion” and editor of the forthcoming “Good Poems, American Places.”

Mark Twain's "hundred-year book"

FROM TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Volume One of the long-awaited autobiography has "multiple beginnings" and "a missing ending"

Susan Gillman

Twain 2010 shows no signs of coming to an end. November 15 saw the release, simultaneously in print and online, for “the first time ever”, of Volume One of the three-volume “complete, authoritative, and uncensored” Autobiography of Mark Twain. That description comes from the University of California Press’s publicity department, but Twain, always his own best publicist, set the terms himself. In his preface “An Early Attempt” (the first of four prefaces he wrote), he tells the reader that his autobiography will not be written according to “the old, old, old inflexible plan” that “starts at the cradle” and “drives straight for the grave”. His autobiography will not be written at all but rather spoken, dictated to a stenographer. “Finally, in Florence, in 1904”, according to his second preface, “The Latest Attempt”, “I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography”: “start it at no particular time of your life . . . talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime”. The second preface was followed by “The Final (and Right) Plan”, and finally “Preface As from the Grave”, in which he explains that the book will not appear until after his death so he can “speak thence freely” with “his whole frank mind”.

Almost immediately, Twain published excerpts from the autobiography in the North American Review, and before too long, his “editors, heirs and assigns”, who had been enjoined to leave out of the first edition anything that might be offensive to the living, were following suit. So, although there have been various autobiographies of Mark Twain, assembled by various editors (up to, most recently, this year’s reissue of Michael J. Kiskis’s tellingly titled Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography of 1990, itself a reprint of extracts serialized in the North American Review), only the University of California Press Autobiography of Mark Twain is stamped with the editorial assurance that whatever is in it represents as nearly as possible what the author “intended” to be published after his death. The question of authorial intention is always tricky, and in this case Mark Twain composed things he said were “for the autobiography” over a period of more than thirty years before hitting on “The Final (and Right) Plan”.

The story of Twain’s great mass of autobiographical manuscripts and typescripts, the clues as to what he wanted put in and left out that are hidden within an estimated 10-foot file of documents, is told by Harriet Elinor Smith in the introduction to this volume. It is a compelling tale, made more so by the editors’ decision to include all the many “false starts” and “scraps” of things composed “for the autobiography” (some of which encompass his most lyrical writing on his boyhood). The result is itself a massive 700-page book; the entire sequence of pref-atory material, all in Twain’s handwriting, in the Mark Twain Papers, is reproduced in facsimile, and there is a set of remarkable photographs of key figures and events in the autobiography. Even more appropriately, for an author who loved technology of all kinds and who enthusiastically embraced any mode of publication (whether “by printing, as at present”, his publisher Colonel Harvey wrote, “or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical method”), the electronic version of this edition will go further than the print version in approximating and imagining the form in which Mark Twain “wanted it done”. It is the purpose of a critical edition not simply to offer the best text, by choosing among variant readings, but also to feature the other readings so that alternative ways of constructing the text are made available. But the list of variants is huge – too big to print. The internet met this challenge: Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) is where all of the textual apparatus – revisions, choices among variants, etc – is accessible. The aim to produce a digital critical edition that offers “unfettered intuitive access” to everything Mark Twain wrote sounds just like him and his fantasy of completeness.

As might be expected from Twain, who was his own best trend-setter, the question of firsts and lasts, beginnings and endings, of quantifying what’s new and what’s not, was first taken up by him. In the “Preface As from the Grave”, he promises: “To be precise – nineteen-twentieths of the book will not see print until after my death”. Oddly reminiscent of the minute fractions he uses in Pudd’nhead Wilson to mock the fictitious purity of racial identity (the protagonist is “one-sixteenth black” and her child “thirty-one parts white; both are slaves and “by a fiction of law and custom a negro”), his computation sets the stage for all the statistics we have been given in the event of the Autobiography’s publication. To take one example: in July 2010, Granta magazine proclaimed a “scoop” in publishing, “for the first time”, a hundred years after the author’s death, after the end of the hundred-year ban on publishing the memoirs, and in advance of the November release of the Autobiography, an extract that (supposedly) brought to light a formerly suppressed account of Twain’s childhood. This was a wonderfully evocative extract from Twain’s memories of his Uncle John Quarles’s farm. While few readers will be aware that this piece had been first published over a hundred years ago in the North American Review (as part of the one twentieth of the autobiography that was seen into print), for many, it represents Twain’s memories of childhood familiar from Huckleberry Finn. In the melancholy opening of the last third of the novel, just after Huck has decided to “go to hell”, rather than turn Jim in as a runaway slave, he arrives at the Phelps farm, one of those little “one-horse cotton plantations” in Arkansas, where Jim is imprisoned by Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally Phelps (characters probably based on Twain’s own uncle and aunt), and Tom Sawyer takes over the direction of the novel. The long dictated section which comes near the beginning of the Autobiography extends and deepens the sense of loneliness that oppresses Huck, the sense of dead spirits whispering and talking. But in contrast to the novel, the version in the autobiographical dictations also complicates the gloomy substratum of Huck’s personality with the adult author’s nostalgic longing for the foodstuff and dense texture of that “heavenly place for a boy”.

"All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line, which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible . . . . In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it."

It would be wrong to ask of these two versions of memories: how do you know which is the right one? Instead of quantifying and trumpeting the new, as editors and publishers must, readers might be encouraged to recognize that they can read something for the first time only once, so that they need to operate differently. We need to recognize the value and pleasure of rereading, in which Mark Twain himself indulged so often. What will ultimately be three volumes of autobiographical dictations reflect a lifetime’s habit of recycling, producing a pastiche that combines the dictations done in the last four years of his life, together with his own earlier writings, parts and whole pieces, as well as inserted newspaper clippings and other documents. Rather than resembling a nineteenth-century blog, the Autobiography fits even better with our culture of remixing, as Twain’s own “methodless method” of wandering at will over the present and the past allows for selfcitation, not only going back over earlier events but also rereading the writings that recorded and represented the events.

The Autobiography is an experiment in talking rather than writing a life and as such it prefers rereading, repetition and recombination to newness. One memorable entry from the preliminary material (entitled “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]”) begins as a history of Twain’s paternal and maternal relatives and ancestors, moves into an anecdote about an incident in Berlin in 1891, and ends with the lyrical description of the author’s idyllic summers on his uncle’s farm near Florida, Missouri. Mark Twain was searching for a way to organize the whole without linear chronology but not without time, rather with an alternative sense of temporality. The search for a non-chronological but nonetheless time-conscious structure is what stamps Mark Twain’s “one-hundred year book” as “time-sensitive”.

Mark Twain’s “talking book” resists the chronological fixity of autobiography, whether a life in letters or any other conventional mode of writing a life. Concerned about the estate he would leave to his two surviving daughters, he thought of extending the lives of his books through new copyright schemes, and wrote about expanding the bulk or “fat” of his book by “dumping in” bits of “little old books” of his. He also kept returning to posthumous publication as a way of allowing himself full frankness (and rancour). So the question of endings – completing, conclusion and closure – is complicated. All texts must come to an end, but other than in the formal sense, they can remain overtly or covertly open-ended, uncompleted, unresolved. You can close the book without closure. In just this way, Twain fixed the beginning (the Quarles Farm section) and end (“Closing Words of My Autobiography”, on the death of his youngest daughter Jean) of his hundred-year book, but left the middle to be expanded or contracted as need be: he gives us the bookends but between them the middle matter is fluid.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain may have a beginning (multiple beginnings, if we count all the false starts) and an ending, but it exhibits another kind of problem ending, one that has continued to plague Twain studies. Ernest Hemingway diagnosed it most famously in Green Hills of Africa (1934): “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating”. But Twain’s sense of a missing ending to his own Southern boyhood, where both slavery and race are concerned, reflects more than authorial cheating. The missing sense of an ending is especially acute in Twain’s novels of slavery, written during the early years of Jim Crow’s strange career but set in the pre-emancipation South, as though the problem of slavery persisted into the age of freedom – or what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the second slavery”. Historians have shown that the date when race-slavery began is as difficult to fix as the moment of its ending. Despite all the years of US Civil Rights legislation, followed by the brief era of affirmative action, most would agree that we have not yet entered a post-race world – and many would argue that the lightning rod of the Fourteenth Amendment, once again in the limelight as it was after the Civil War, indicates that redress for slavery and segregation is still an unfinished revolution. Mark Twain’s struggles for and against endings are our own.

Harriet Elinor Smith, et al, editors
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN
Volume One 760pp. University of California Press. $34.95;
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24.95.
978 0 520 26719 0

Susan Gillman teaches World Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the co-editor, with Russ Castronovo, of States of Emergency: The object of American studies, 2009. She is researching her next book, Our Mediterranean: American adaptations, 1890–1975.

One of the most venerable and respected magazines in the business is on its way to its first profit in years, thanks to a new focus on the web.

The Atlantic, the 153-year-old magazine that once published Mark Twain, hadn’t made money in at least a decade. So its managers decided to radically reinvent themselves by focusing more effort on the web.

That strategy has apparently worked. The New York Times reports the Atlantic is on its way to turning a $1.8 million profit this year. That may not seem like huge money. But then again, the magazine had been losing money for a decade. So any profit is pretty good.

“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, told the Times. “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’ ”

It’s a lesson other media companies may want to take to heart as they face ever-more disruptive competition from the web. Maybe the leaders of the Gray Lady herself should be reading their own paper (or web site), since The New York Times Company was demoted from the S&P 500 last week and is now listed as a mid-cap stock.



Read more: http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/pressed/2010/12/13/atlantic-monthly-turns-first-profit-in-years-by-thinking-like-startup#ixzz180X6hnIk

Mark Twain on truth and fiction

From The Guardian
He banned its publication until 100 years after his death. Now, the long wait to read Mark Twain's autobiography is over. So what does it reveal about the father of American literature?

John Crace guardian.co.uk

Mark Twain's instructions were quite clear: his autobiography was to remain unpublished until 100 years after his death. You couldn't imagine a writer doing something like that these days. Who could resist a pay cheque in the here and now for deferred immortality in the hereafter? More to the point, could any modern writer be certain their lives would still be interesting to anyone so long after their death?

Hubris never came into Twain's calculations. He was the American writer, the rags-to-riches embodiment of the American dream, and it never seems to have occurred to him that his popularity would fade. Nor has it. He is still the writer before whom everyone from Faulkner to Mailer has knelt. And even though his literary executors might not have followed his instructions to the letter – various chunks of his autobiography have been published over the years – this year's publication of the first of three planned collections of Twain's full autobiographical writings to coincide with the centenary of his death has still been one of the literary events of the year.

Still more remarkable is that Twain's reputational longevity is based on so few books. As John Sutherland, emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of English at University College London, points out, "Huckleberry Finn has been largely off-limits in American schools and colleges because of Twain's use of the word "nigger", so most readers only know him for his aphorisms and Tom Sawyer. And even that is overrated. Dickens published 12 novels, any one of which can be argued to vindicate his status as Britain's greatest. Where are Twain's dozen? What makes him the 'father' of American fiction?"

Sutherland suggests the answer lies in voice, eye and attitude. Twain was a gifted public speaker; he turned literature into something that was heard as well as seen; and cast himself as an innocent, with a decidedly jaundiced, feisty gaze on the rest of the world. "Take these three elements," he says, "and, as Hemingway argued, you have the essence of a national literature. After Twain, no one could dismiss it as 'English literature written in America.' It was itself."

And it's the voice that shines through his autobiography. "The general reader gets to see the man beyond the aphorisms," says Harriet Smith, editor of the Mark Twain Project, "but for the serious academic there are no new facts about his life revealed. What we get is him speaking to us from beyond the grave; even in the passages that seem quite boring his appeal still resonates for the infelicities – rather than being a flaw – are a window into how he thought and what jogged his memory."

Above all, there is no linear narrative. He first toyed with the idea of writing his autobiography in the 1870s but abandoned the idea because he couldn't find a way of telling the truth about himself. Finally, after the death of his wife, Olivia, in 1904, he came up with two solutions. The first – almost certainly borrowed from the Freudian psychoanalytic model of free association – was to dictate his thoughts to a stenographer; for 15 minutes each day he would start by deliberating on an item of news that had captured his attention and see where it led. The second was to self-impose a 100-year rule, so that by the time any judgment was passed he would be "dead, unaware and indifferent".

Not that any of this necessarily had the desired effect. "If you're relying on memory," says novelist Michael Frayn, "how – even with the best of intentions – can you distinguish between what you remember and what you make up? A biographer can seek corroboration elsewhere; a personal memoir does not have that advantage." Biographer Claire Tomalin takes this further. "Any journal that is intended for publication – even in 100 years' time – is probably in some way compromised. The only person I can think of who got close to an unexpurgated truth is Samuel Pepys, and that's because his diaries were never meant to be read."

Blake Morrison, whose two memoirs of the lives – and as importantly – deaths of both his parents were both bestsellers, concludes that a writer can only tell his or her truth and that you just have to accept it may not be someone else's. "I did make some compromises," he says. "I gave the manuscript of When Did You Last See Your Father?' to my mother to read and made a number of small changes – including concealing the fact she was a Catholic – she requested.

"But I wasn't conscious of deliberately suppressing anything. In fact, the reverse. Sometimes it's easier to say something on the page rather than in person: I certainly got a few odd looks in the office the week after the book was published and everyone had read 'that' passage about me masturbating in the bath."

You certainly won't find anything like that in the Twain autobiography. Indeed, he as good as admitted that in many instances he didn't even try to tell the remorseless truth when he wrote that he could think of 1,500 incidents of which he was ashamed and had not put to paper. "Even the two shameful incidents of which he does write – being unable to prevent his young son from falling in the river [he went on to catch diphtheria and die] and not allowing his wife to visit a friend in Scotland – are hardly the stuff of deep shame," says Smith.

There's an obvious danger here of applying 21st-century values to something that was written in the early years of the 20th century. Yet there is something quintessentially modern about Twain. Not least in the blurring of his public and private personas. Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens: his nom de plume derives from the Mississippi boatmen's cry for "safe passage". Yet despite a fierce attachment to the idea of telling the truth, it never seems to have occurred to him to call the book The Autobiography of Sam Clemens. Much in the way that Bono and Sting never use their real names today. To his readers, to his friends – and, above all, to himself – Mark Twain was every bit as real as Sam Clemens.

Twain understood the value of his image and went to some lengths to protect it. Some of the more fascinating passages in the autobiography are those that have been crossed out. These are, more often than not, the ones about which he was particularly sensitive. And they aren't to do with the personal, such as his feelings of loss over the deaths of his wife and daughter, Susy, or his suspicions about being financially ripped off by his manager, Ralph Ashcroft, and his secretary, Isabel Lyon. They are about the abstract. Such as religion.

"There are some extracts, including one in which he confuses the Virgin birth and the Immaculate Conception, in which he declares his religious scepticism robustly, about which Twain was extremely nervous," says Smith. "He was so worried he would be ostracised and shunned for this by God-fearing Americans that he actually set a publication date of 2406 for those sections."

Imagine. A man so protective and nervous of his own reputation that he sought to keep some of the ideas he thought might alienate his public silent for 500 years. Yet equally a man so sure of his reputation that he had no doubts people would still want to read him 500 years after his death. There, in essence, is Twain's ambivalence between the public and the private, between truth and spin. Needless to say, his executors didn't adhere to the 500-year diktat and the American public continue to adore him regardless. Then Twain being Twain, he'd have hardly expected anything less.

Mark Twain’s letter of advice to a Toronto-area writer to be auctioned off

FROM
http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/22/mark-twains-letter-of-advice-to-a-toronto-area-writer-to-be-auctioned-off/#ixzz161W5mPlP

by Randy Boswell

In 1881, a 21-year-old aspiring Canadian writer mailed a letter to American novelist Samuel Clemens — aka Mark Twain — seeking advice from the celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer about how to make one’s way in the literary world.

Clemens’ response — a five-page, handwritten letter warning the young Canadian about the pitfalls of pouring his thoughts into a book before gaining more life experience — has been described as one of the most important and candid pronouncements on writing by a man many consider the greatest figure in 19th-century American literature.

Clemens’ heartfelt (but predictably funny) tough-love letter to the young Toronto-area writer — Bruce Weston Munro, who did go on to publish a few largely forgotten works of humour in the late 1880s — is expected to sell for up to $40,000 at an auction of historic manuscripts next month in New York.

The artifact represents a remarkable moment in the life of Clemens, who pointedly paused from his own book project at the time — presumably his enduring masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — and “sacrificed my day” in a bid to steer the inquiring Canadian away from publishing a book in his 20s.

“The advice Clemens gives him is indeed quite frank, and is based on a backward glance at his own personal experience,” said Sotheby’s manuscripts specialist Elizabeth Muller, noting how Clemens was 30 when he published his first lengthy piece of writing.

It appears that Munro sent the manuscript of a proposed book to Clemens, who was then 45 and well known for his 1876 bestseller Tom Sawyer— but struggling to complete its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, finally published in 1884.

“You make a conclusive argument against your book: first, when you mention your age; second, when you state what your life has been,” Clemens, pulling no punches, wrote to Munro from his home in Hartford, Connecticut, on Oct. 21, 1881.

“Experience of life (not of books), is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted,” he added. “I do not see how any but a colossal genius can write a readable prose book before he is 30 years old.”

But key to achieving enough skill to “produce a readable book at 30 or 40″ is a “good, honest, diligent, painstaking apprenticeship of 15 or 20 years with the pen,” Clemens insisted. “You will have to produce & burn as much manuscript as the rest of us have done before your mill will yield something that is really worth printing.”

Concerned that he might be hurting Munro’s feelings, Clemens concluded with a touchingly personal appeal to the ambitious Canadian to take the advice in stride.

“I would not wound you for the world,” Clemens wrote. “But if I have nevertheless done it you have your revenge, since I have sacrificed my day to you: for he that desires to do the best work he can, doth not put a part of his day’s steam into a letter, first & then work with a three-quarter head of it on a book afterward, you know.

“But no matter — the day is of no consequence, & I had a strong desire to say some things to you which I honestly believed might be of value & service to you.”

The letter ends with Clemens repeating that he did not mean “to be harsh” with Munro, and is signed: “Truly yours, S.L. Clemens.”

Born in 1860, Munro is known to have written occasionally for Canadian newspapers in the late 19th century and — against Clemens’ advice — self-published his first book in 1886, at age 26.

The book, printed in Toronto, was titled A Blundering Boy: A Humorous Story.

The book, about a boy named William who was prone to mistakes in life that sometimes “partook of the ludicrous,” was apparently not a big seller in post-Confederation Canada.

Munro followed with an underwhelming collection of anecdotes from the legal profession — Splinters; Or, a Grist of Giggles — and published another unheralded collection of humorous writings in 1889 with Groans and Grins of One Who Survived in 1889.

In 2003, when Clemens’ 1881 letter to Munro first emerged from a private U.S. collection, it was noted that in an auction catalogue that the Canadian’s own books “do not seem to have stood the test of time.”

But in serving as Clemens’ muse for an impromptu treatise on book-writing, Munro left a genuine legacy to the world of literature.

“We have found nothing comparable to this letter in the auction records for any major 19th-century American writer,” a San Francisco auction house stated when the letter was resold at a 2007 sale. “And thus it is, in all probability, the most profound statement on the craft of writing by any of those writers that can be obtained.”

Mark Twain’s Autobiography Flying Off the Shelves

I'm wondering when all the Mark Twain's notebooks will be published. Concerning the Autobiography only the firs part comes out...pieces, parts, fragments of a rich and complicated life...

FROM NYTIMES
By JULIE BOSMAN

When editors at the University of California Press pondered the possible demand for “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir, they kept their expectations modest with a planned print run of 7,500 copies.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain” is a smash hit across the country.
Now it is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.

“It sold right out,” said Kris Kleindienst, an owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which first ordered 50 copies and has a dozen people on a waiting list. “You would think only completists and scholars would want a book like this. But there’s an enduring love affair with Mark Twain, especially around here. Anybody within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi River has a Twain attachment.”

Farther upriver, at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Paul Ingram, the book buyer, said he initially ordered 10 copies, but they disappeared almost immediately.

“We are dearly hoping we’ll get more copies in a couple of weeks,” Mr. Ingram said. “I’m sure every bookseller in the world is saying, ‘I should have been sharper, I should have thought this one through more carefully.’ ”

Earlier this week, the book was out of stock at a handful of Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Boston and Austin, Tex. On Borders.com, it is back-ordered for at least two to four weeks. Some independent booksellers said they had been told, much to their despair, that they would not receive reorders until mid-December or even January.

“It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla. “In this age of instant books, why does it take so long to reprint it?”

Those who have been lining up to buy it seem to be a mix of Twain aficionados, history buffs and early Christmas shoppers who gravitate toward big, heavy classic biographies as gifts.

“It’s totally the Dad book of the year,” said Rebecca Fitting, an owner of the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “It’s that autobiography, biography, history category, a certain kind of guy gift book.”

Many booksellers said the memoir has a perfect holiday-gift quality: a widely adored author, a weighty feel, and a unique story behind its publication. (Twain ordered that the book be published a century after his death.)

Most of the content was dictated to Twain’s stenographer in the four years before he died, at 74 in 1910. It is more political than his previous works, by turns frank, funny, angry and full of recollections from his childhood, which deeply influenced books like “Huckleberry Finn.”

A younger generation of readers is discovering Twain for his political writings, Ms. Fitting said.

“He’s surprisingly relevant right now,” she added. “When you look at how much he wrote and the breadth of the subjects he wrote about, you know that if he were alive today, he would totally be a blogger.”

Steve Kettmann, an American writer living in Berlin, said that he tried to buy a copy during a visit to a Borders in Orlando, Fla., but was told that they were sold out and would not receive more copies for four to six weeks. (He went to another Borders nearby, found two copies, and bought them both.)

“I just think that there’s a feeling out there by a lot of people that Mark Twain is one of our greatest writers, and there’s something particularly American about his combination of wit and insight,” Mr. Kettmann said. “He was a wonderful showman. And he was cool, let’s face it. That’s part of it.”

Alex Dahne, a spokeswoman for the University of California Press, said the book was the biggest success the publisher has had in 60 years.

The first print run of “Autobiography” was for 50,000 copies. Thomson-Shore, a small printer in Michigan that is producing the books, has been working overtime and is now producing 30,000 copies a week. To speed up delivery, the printer found bigger-than-usual trucks to carry books to warehouses in Richmond, Calif., and Ewing, N.J. — the trucks carry 10,000 copies instead of the usual 7,000.

The book will reach the No. 7 spot on The New York Times’s hardcover nonfiction best-seller list to be published on Nov. 28, its fourth week on the list. On Friday afternoon it was No. 4 on the BN.com best-seller list, behind “Decision Points,” former President George W. Bush’s memoir; the latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” an illustrated children’s novel by Jeff Kinney; and “Unbroken,” a prisoner-of-war’s story by Laura Hillenbrand.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain” received a huge lift from excerpts in Granta, Newsweek, Playboy and Harper’s Magazine, and a burst of early media coverage this summer, well in advance of the official Nov. 15 publication date. The publisher created an eye-catching Web site, thisismarktwain.com, complete with audio, black-and-white photos and a timeline of Twain’s life. (Two more 600-page volumes are planned.)

Edward Ash-Milby, a buyer for Barnes & Noble, said the book had already emerged as one of the hottest of the holiday season.

“I believe it has a certain cachet, a gift of quality that says a lot about the giver as well as the recipient,” Mr. Ash-Milby said in an e-mail. “It’s literary, but not too tough to read. The content, itself, is immensely readable, although nonlinear. It can be easily picked up and read in spots without the worry of plot lines or continuity.”

Booksellers seemed to agree that the memoir, which has letters, diary entries, pictures and nearly 200 pages of “explanatory notes,” is a book to be read in small bites.

“I’ve barely had a chance to look at it, but from what I did see, it looked like the kind of book you would never finish, and you would never even think of reading start to finish,” said Mr. Ingram of Prairie Lights. “But it’s the kind of book you would read a little bit of every day of your life.”

While many booksellers were caught flat-footed by the intense interest in the book, others said they saw it coming. The book is currently available at Amazon.com and BN.com. At BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn, booksellers initially ordered 100 copies, the general manager, Zack Zook, said.

“We felt from the beginning that it was a title which our neighborhood would gravitate heavily toward,” Mr. Zook said. “There’s genuine interest there. It’s been on our best-seller list now for weeks.”

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., ordered 600 copies and has already sold 500. Six hundred more books are on the way.

Ms. Dahne of the University of California Press said the publisher was rushing to get copies to bookstores and promised that they would be there in time for the holidays.

“We feel like, wow, America’s kind of excited about a literary icon,” she said. “There’s something very sweet about the fact that people are interested in a 736-page scholarly tome about Mark Twain.”

Mark Twain work sells for €79,300

A handwritten chapter of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad sold for $79,300 at auction, which was well above expectations, the auction house said today.

The Twain work had a pre-sale estimate of between $30,000 and $50,000, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers said.

Last night's fine books and manuscripts auction brought the gavel down on a handwritten high school essay by a young Ernest Hemingway for $7,320, a Potomac Company document signed by George Washington that sold for $9,670, and autographed documents from Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse.

"The sales results were astounding, proving once again that property from private collections that is fresh to the market will always attract competitive bidding," said Mary Williams, the auction house's director of books and manuscripts.

Another sale item drawing interest was a "death mask" made of bank robber John Dillinger, which sold for $3,660.

Reuters

Mark Twain’s top travel spots

Mark Twain called the Lion of Lucerne a mournful piece of stone. It's hard to disagree.

from http://www.thestar.com/travel/article/892940--mark-twain-s-top-travel-spots

By Petti Fong

The most famous and beloved travel writer America ever produced once confessed to a reporter that he didn’t even like travelling that much.

He was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri 175 years ago but when Mark Twain landed by steamer ship or at rail stations at various ports and crossings around the world, he was known simply as The American.

In the late 19th century, Twain travelled to destinations most of his readers could never dream about visiting. For him, travel and discovering new cultures and customs was, as he once famously wrote, “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

His motives for travelling were initially financial and he left his beloved home in Hartford, Conn. in order to make money after falling into debt over failed ventures in printing machines.

Twain’s travelogues were eagerly read first by Americans but his audience grew international with readers from around the world who became his travel companions and followed in his footsteps.

As the 100th anniversary of his death approaches on Nov. 30, Star Travel section revisits some of the places Twain travelled to on his journeys around the world as the tramp abroad followed the equator to destinations near and far.

HAWAII

One of Twain’s first assignments was to head to what was then known as the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866.

“It has been six weeks since I touched a pen. In explanation and excuse I offer the fact that I spent that time (with the exception of one week) on the island of Maui. I only got back yesterday. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye so regretfully. I doubt if there is a mean person there, from the homeliest man on the island (Lewers) down to the oldest (Tallant). I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration whatever. It will be five or six weeks before I write again. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.”

The Sacramento Daily Union, 1866

GERMANY and SWITZERLAND

During a visit to the Castle of Heidelberg, Twain took a boat ride on the nearby Neckar River which inspired him to write a chapter in Huckleberry Finn.

“Behind the Castle is a great dome-shaped hill, forest-clad and beyond that a nobler and loftier one. The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town, and from the town two picturesque old bridges span the river. Now the view broadens, through the gateway of the sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide Rhine plain, which stretches away softly and richly tinted, grows gradually and dreamily indistinct and finally melts imperceptibly into the remote horizon. I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.”

In Lucerne, Twain fell ill with what he called a “disease” that led him to want to buy 150 wood-carved cuckoo clocks. He succumbed to purchasing three. There, he went to see the Lion of Lucerne monument that had been carved to commemorate the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris during the French Revolution.

“The Lion of Lucerne is the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world. The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of Frances. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind and a clear stream trickles form above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored among the water-lilies. ... The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere but nowhere so impressive as where he is.”

The Tramp Abroad: Volume 1 and Volume 4

ENGLAND

Twain had wanted to write a travel book about his time in England and did end up writing two novels set in England: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the Prince and the Pauper. But as he explained in a dispatch to the Hartford Courant, he couldn’t satirize England in the way he wanted.

“I have spent a great deal of time in England. I made a world of notes but it was no use. I couldn’t get any fun out of England. It is too grave a country and its gravity soaks into the stranger and makes him as serious as everyone else. When I was there I couldn’t seem to think of anything but deep problems of government, taxes, free trade, finance. One is bound to respect England, she is one of the three great republics of the world but she is not good text for hilarious literature. No, there wasn’t anything to satirize—what I mean is, you couldn’t satirize any given thing in England in any but a halfhearted way, because your conscience told you to look nearer home and you would find that very thing at your own door. A man with a humpbacked uncle mustn’t make fun of another man’s cross-eyed aunt.”

Hartford Courant, 1879

MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Before and after the American Civil War, Twain was a steamboat pilot, one of his many occupations throughout his lifetime. Life on the Mississippi was part memoir based on his experiences when he was a young man training on the steamboats and the second half was about Twain revisiting the Mississippi years later.

“Mississippi steam boating was born about 1812, at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature...it killed the old-fashioned keep-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing.”

Life on the Mississippi, 1883

SWEDEN

In 1899, Twain, his wife and his 19-year-old daughter Jean, who were all in ill health, left London for Sweden to be treated by a noted osteopath, Heinrich Kellgren. Twain, then 64 years old, had had a long history of physical ailments including a severe long lasting common cold. But despite his health problems, he was besotted with the scenery, writing that happiness is a Swedish sunset.

“I’ve no business in here — I ought to be outside. I shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. This is the place to be. I have seen about 60 sunsets here; and a good 40 of them were away and beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty and exquisite and marvellous beauty and infinite charm and variety. America? Italy? The tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. And this one—this unspeakable wonder. It discounts all the rest. It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful.”

Letter to a friend in 1899

VICTORIA, VANCOUVER

In 1895, Twain began a lecturing trip around the world which began in Paris. He and his family sailed to America arriving on the west coast in midsummer. In August he spoke at the Vancouver Opera House to a standing-room-only crowd and then met with reporters. Suffering from a bad cold, he spent a few days in his room reading books and writing letters before travelling to Victoria where he was to set sail to Sydney Australia.

“We moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and summer sea; an enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea to all on board; it certainly was to the distressful dustings and smokings and swelterings of the past weeks. The voyage would furnish a three-weeks holiday, with hardly a break in it. We had the whole Pacific Ocean in front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable. The city of Victoria was twinkling dim in the deep heart of her smoke-cloud, and getting ready to vanish and now we closed the field-glasses and sat down on our steamer chairs contented and at peace.”

Following the Equator, 1895

INDIA

At 60 and looking so frail local papers warned him to leave before the time of the great heat, Twain travelled to India. Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine noted that Twain, who travelled up and down the length of India, stayed at the home of an Indian prince and loved the country so much that in his notebook he had written in capital letters “INDIA THE MARVELOUS”.

“This was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure, there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack except that there are only thirty-five miles of it, except five hundred....So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”

Following the Equator, 1897