News & Articles

A good while past Sam Clemens (later known more famously) wrote his first large-scale work (The Innocents Abroad) about a trip to the Holy Land by the devout and not so on a side-wheel steamer named Quaker City.

Until I quite accidentally stumbled (not literally) on a copy of The Innocents. A gloriously wise 19-year-old, I had scant regard for the work of old-fashioned Mark Twain. Fact, I thought Tom Sawyer especially sappy, a view I held so steadfastly that no amount of Huck Finn praise could budge me.

I’d later mend my view on Finn, nudged but not convinced by Hemingway, another of the bright literary lights not impressive to me.

What is it, I wonder, sways a private position from East to West, or one inclination to another? If only I knew, but I don’t.

Having avoided getting regularly beat up by being funny (define that as you wish), maybe I had a comic sense, or at least of timing. The Innocents opened me to the place in history and practice of American humor, never to be confused with a British wheeze or mild Norwegian hoot.

I wager that too-too many readers aren’t appreciative of American humor, a shortcoming to be pitied. I can’t fix this humorous deficiency in others other than to remind it is all so very much in the ear.

American humor favors an oral stance. It needs be heard. In an earlier life I told students to read Huck Finn with their ears, an excellent guide more apt to bring results than skim-reading.

Reading with the ears means listening. Especially to pauses. For people in a hurry the pause is a problem. Their problem, I’d say.

Back to my first encounter with those innocents, I was in a cheap (affordable sounds better but cheap is more honest) third-floor apartment slightly north of the U of M campus, where I tried to trick stodgy professors into thinking me able, or at least passable. Success was mixed.

Oh, those worthies knew a lot and could go on at considerable (God help me) length about Hawthorne or Cooper or other writers who I opined hadn’t passed soon enough to their reward.

My way to say they imparted with a signal lack of passion, and passion was what I found in one incident upon another in the traveling innocents.

Winter and cold, I set a reading tent alongside the apartment’s single steam radiator, and there I perched, hulked is more accurate.

How many times I read and re-read is lost, but by gosh, I felt a passion and connection with Twain’s with and style.

A wonderful connection, it has stayed with me. A bust of Sam looks over me in my office, and in ways I consider him a friend I truly miss not having.

His humor crept in, and if a person has to pick between heavily serious and quick sense of humor I’ll lay odd on humor being more useful more often, at least in terms of encouraging a pause to reflect with laughter.

Pitchforks and torches burning are fine for some situations, but I feel that finding the humor in situations is, plainly put, more human. Times I’ve been in a sweat over some cat apostrophe or other have on occasion been saved from abyss leaping by realizing there’s a chuckle to be appreciated seeing what a fool I acted. A pause and not getting too deep into the serious has proven itself often beneficial.

But about me, no matter. More important, the friend I didn’t meet and how I knew him. How to know a person?

Life on the Mississippi shows a mind starting with a boy’s simple fascination with being a pilot to one able to learn a river upstream and down, day or night, in high water or low. More than I could manage.
Accomplish all that and then leave it in grief over a younger brother lost in the same pursuit. Tragedy. When I did a Mark Twain program I thought the loss of the brother, Henry, as critical as the addition of Livvy to the author’s life. Some things are strong hints of character.

Then there’s TAoHF, Huckleberry Finn, a tale too big to summarize in simplicity. Hemingway, whom I generally avoid, had, I hold, its importance correct.

How important? So much that most today who know it know more about than of. Assuming politics does not get a reader to know Huck any more than fussing at a moonless night to teach astronomy or waving scripture can instruct on God.

Adolescent Huck runs too deep for many, so might be prudent to look among the many short stories. If able to slow down to read conversationally with listening ears, try the McWilliams tales as a handy look into the style and humor of a writer and an age. But go slowly. Take your time. Listen. Enjoy.

No better way to conclude than look at Twain’s end. Was he who stood behind US Grant promoting the memoir that kept a dying ex-President from poverty he’d soon face himself when promoting a printing device brought ruin.

Older, preferring to retire, he none-theless set out to tour city to city around the globe, stand-up humor for a not so funny age.

Does this tell us something of the strong oral tradition in American humor and writing? It might. Or in fact it does. In spades, so-t’-speak. Why in old age labor so when retirement in easy impoverishment was so near?

Why? To pay debts. To even out what was owed. Lofty voices proposing to teach often say money is the root of evil. Correct, if you want to be fine being wrong. It’s love of money attracts evil, not its just use or application.

Having once stumbled into giving a mini review on U Boots in Laboe, I can neither promise nor predict what may occur on the Sandwich, Hula Hand, Islands, Yorkey’s Knob or any number of ocean islands beginning in M.

But I’ll be thinking of you, readers, and I’ll try, especially to not too much enjoy the tropics introduced to my 12 years empty head by Willard Price.