Post Memorial Day Idyll

Tell the truth or trump - but get the trick.  
Calendar of Puddin'head Wilson From the novel of the same name. 

I found that nothing reduced my esteem for Mark Twain more than attempting to read his complete works. There are real gems in it but much, perhaps most of it is pretty bad.  Of all of his books, and I believe I read all of them, I like Life on the Mississippi the best.  I detest Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper and never thought the frog story that made him famous as a humorist was funny, not at all when I was assigned to read it in 6th grade.  Like much of his humor, especially that delivered as narrative instead of off the cuff remarks by mostly callow minds, it was forced. 

Which brings me to the worst thing about Twain, he wrote out of the minds of children.  Even Puddin'head Wilson, an intelligent small town intellectual is more a boy-man tinkerer science sleuth.  He's almost not important to the story which, as whenever Twain deals with racial discrimination, is him at his best.  His discovery of the tragic truth through fingerprints is anachronistic in the extreme for antebellum Missouri.  No doubt Twain had seen Galton's book on fingerprints of a year or two before he wrote the book.  It's sort of riverboat steam-punk of its time.  

That writing tactic of elevating childish thinking inevitably leads into nostalgic sentimentalism, wallowing in romanticized memories of childhood as we would like it to have been.  It's remarkable how many of the most esteemed books in the canon have that feature, that they present the thinking of children as some kind of perfection, even when they deal with terrible things in reality.   It'll lead you to produce best sellers and get you fame and even some enduring celebrity but it's never going to be useful to grownups for much.   Nowadays I doubt most children ever get more of it than Hollywood might bring their way.  I know college-credentialed young'uns who never read anything by him.  And why should they have?  It's not as if they're missing vital life lessons from it.  They could get more from reading, especially, the non-fiction literature produced by Black writers of his time and learn a lot more than he's going to give them.  Not to mention women - it's remarkable how few women there are in most of his stuff.  

I've pissed off some by pointing out something others have noticed, that his most esteemed book,  Huckleberry Finn totally falls apart at the end when he and Jim get washed up at just the right place for them to meet up with Tom Sawyer and after some truly awful writing about their days at Sawyer's relatives place, Jim finds out he's been freed, not by his own initiative but by the nobility of the white woman who held him in bondage.  It's like Twain didn't plan on how to end the book with any kind of realism once he ran out of river and so he just reverted to the same bilge he had success with in Tom Sawyer.  

That quote you throw at me, "Faith is making believe you know what you know ain't true (sic)", you got it wrong as so many online seem to have, and as you no doubt got from those on line who made the same mistake, it wasn't from Huckleberry Finn, it's from Puddin'head Wilson's New Calendar, the humorous "quotes" with which Twain prefaced the chapters in Following The Equator.   Which has a number of virtues even as it is a mess of a book which he wrote to get himself out of debt from making a really dumb bad investment which he also involved a number of others in.   It was his most cynical period which doesn't wear well.  I think he never had a mature reaction against the rather dreadful unreconstructed Calvinism of his youth.  As any number of intelligent believers who have had much interaction with barroom style atheists and agnostics - certainly the style that Twain affected - they find very quickly that the God such atheists don't believe in is a God they never believed in to start with.  I would conclude that the inability of such people to imagine a God of mature faith is probably the reason they are rather callow in their atheism.  

In looking at the sources for this,  I thought I might go back and re-read Puddin'head Wilson to see if it was any better than I thought in the 1980s, when I did my Complete Twain project.  I found the first chapter of the book started out with the quote I started with up top which is oddly appropriate for 2020 for its juxtaposition of truth and trump.  It's the reason I decided to write this. 

By the way,  the full quote goes:

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

As I said, an elevation of the thinking of children sentimentally taken as profundity.  So many an atheist proudly proclaims that he made up his mind when he was nine or ten and hasn't changed it ever since.  Which doesn't surprise me after this past two decades of the "new atheism" and my review of the old stuff, too.