The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

Mark Twain. Photo: skeeze [CC0] via Pixabay.

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised by Mark Twain's views on women. I have become accustomed to nineteenth-century authors verging on the misogynistic, but Twain, at least from this collection of quotes, would appear to be the exception to the rule. For instance (p. 6):

No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.

This is a bit rich, of course, because Twain relied heavily on his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, although he seems to have worked hard to keep the family financially afloat. Twain writes (p. 6):

There is only one good sex. The female one.

Yet Twain was critical of humans (p. 5):

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah didn't miss the boat.

There are many other quotes on religion, nationalism, the liberal ideal (as it relates to monarchy versus a republic), and socialisation. For example (p. 54):

We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us.

Yet his pithy sayings are usually humorous (p. 54):

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

I did not know that Twain had to declare bankruptcy in 1894. I had assumed that he was successful and that was that. But his ironic wit may well have been a result of his financial trials and tribulations: he went on an international lecture tour to make ends meet (p. 46):

To be busy is man's only happiness.

It makes me wonder how he maintained his sense of humour when things went awry. Maybe that his wife owned the rights to his work helped, hence his admiration for her. He was also experienced in the attitudes of the world (p. 50):

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I have now read a few of these Dover Thrift Editions of The Wit and Wisdom of..., and although they are quite short, and are not truly "books", there is much to learn from an intense immersion in the highlights of the greats of the past, and Twain is no exception.

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On a mystical journey with Italo Calvino, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan

Inside The Venetian Casino, Macau. Photo: jgmarcelino [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom writes that Invisible Cities is worthy of being read and re-read, and is one of the best short story works of the twentieth century by the "fabulist" Italo Calvino. Bloom suggests that Calvino is Borgesian and Kafkan. 

The connecting thread is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, with Polo describing the cities he has visited, so the Great Khan can know better his crumbling empire. Bloom says of Calvino's wisdom (a recurring compliment from the great critic) that:

Calvino's advice tells us again how to read and why: be vigilant, apprehend and recognise the possibility of the good, help it to endure, give it space in your life.

The cities described are apparently all versions of Venice, with Kublai Khan later recognising this and trying to describe instead the cities to Polo. An endless chess game becomes a vehicle to describe the cities using the pieces and the board as metaphors. 

A "fabulist" is "a person who composes or relates fables". What I found most interesting about these (at times) very short stories is the way they are arranged (or scattered, as Bloom writes) around themes of thin cities, trading cities, dead cities, the sky, even fanciful cities such as Brave New World and Yahooland. 

Within the descriptions, there are numerous anachronisms: motorcycles, aircraft, steamships, and so on. But these never interrupt the reader and provide a connection with the present. The combination of fanciful and mystical characters who appear in the cities (for example, a woman who milks the carcass of a cow) are echoed in Gabriel García Márquez's work, but there is a difference. 

Márquez was regarded as a "magical realist", whereas Calvino's Invisible Cities is less realist and more like a series of fairy tales. I noticed myself drifting off into fantasy with the mystical imagery and the slipperiness of time; not in the J.R.R. Tolkien sense of fantasy, but an older, classical, Brothers Grimm-like fantasy land that repeatedly connects the past with the present and indeed the future. 

This work is more serious in tone than Palomar or Marcovaldo, but it still has their mystical qualities. I must admit to experiencing a sense of peace while reading this work, and although some aspects have a darker quality, I couldn't help but think of Don Draper's pitch for Lucky Strike in Mad Men:

Advertising is based on one thing, happiness, its reassurance that whatever you are doing, it’s OK, you are OK.

Of course, Bloom (How to Read and Why, pp. 62-64) has more academic things to say about Calvino, but for me, one actually experiences his stories. 

In trying to articulate Calvino's style more clearly, I turned to the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel and found that Calvino is described as a "post-modernist", and that Le città invisibili has (p. 174):

...closer affinities to the allegory of the Middle Ages than to the realist novel.

An allegory is a story:

...that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.

I suppose this is what Harold Bloom means by the lessons we can learn from Calvino's wisdom. But even as an aside to read intermittently, the mystical qualities of the short stories provide sufficient space from reality for the reader to rejuvenate, to think, to imagine, and to dream; even just for a moment. 

This mystical quality is what I admire most about Calvino, and I am pleased to have stumbled upon Marcovaldo in a Shanghai bookstore a few years ago that led me to take this journey with the great post-modern Italian master.

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Taking the Mickey Bliss out of a Loved One

Coffin shop, Warsaw, Poland. Photo: FastilyClone [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia.

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am on a journey to read all of Evelyn Waugh's work and The Loved One is regarded as one of his best. Reviewing the book for the New York Times on 23rd June 1948, Orville Prescott wrote that:

Mr Waugh has never written more brilliantly.

I was surprised that an American reviewer found the work so witty because it is a critique of all the worst of Hollywood's excess. (Apparently, it was written after Waugh had been in Hollywood, trying to adapt his most famous work, Brideshead Revisited, for the screen.) 

The term "the loved one" refers to the dead, and the story takes place between the Whispering Glades Memorial Park (a mortuary and cemetery) and the Happier Hunting Ground (a pet cemetery which mimics its well-regarded neighbour). 

The mimicry of great monuments in Whispering Glades (built in modern materials with modern "improvements" to the originals) reminded me of The Venetian casino in Macau, where the inside is a wonderful replica of Venice, including canals, gondolas, singing gondoliers and random arias sung from the fake buildings that line the canals. (It is so good it is obviously fake, much like modern movies that use so much CGI they are more like cartoons than motion pictures.) 

The dark satire follows a bizarre love triangle and the various tragedies that occur are oddly humorous. Prescott suggests that Waugh's novella is short, but thankfully so, because:

At times the joke wears thin, the continued attack seems a little too much like beating a demonstrably dead dog.

The joke is not just on American excess, but on the British in Hollywood and their bizarre attempts to maintain a sense of empire, despite their empire all-but having fallen apart by the time the novella was written. Waugh's satire is very sharp. It isn't so much tongue in cheek or deadpan, but rather so real that you can tell it is false. Hemingway may well have approved. 

That Waugh was an admirer of Hemingway is evident in an interview with The Paris Review in 1963:

I think that Hemingway made real discoveries about the use of language in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I admired the way he made drunk people talk.

But the thing with Waugh is that one can never be sure. Is he taking the mickey or is he serious? The point is that he is taking the mickey, but from what I can gather of Waugh's work so far, there are some serious themes underlying the dark humour. As Hemingway wrote in Esquire in October 1935 (By-Line, p. 221):

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

I now see echoes of Waugh in Colson White's Underground Railway: you know it is fake but it is so well written it is entirely believable. Not like CGI, which is clearly fake, but in a way that one can suspend reality long enough to truly believe the story. Even if I do still shudder a little when I think of the goings on at the mortuary, the idea of fake presented as real is a key theme. 

Take, for instance, Waugh's protagonist, the failed poet Dennis Barlow, whose plagiarism is so good that it is largely undetected. Unless, of course, the target of his plagiarised poetry is too stupid to notice. Of Barlow's "girlfriend", Prescott wrote:

Her IQ was little above idiocy.

Perhaps this is closer to the point. The fakery is so real that we blindly accept stupidity as truth, yet we are too vain to notice the difference. Waugh was indeed brilliant, and that I am unable to tell when he is taking the mickey is probably more a case of him telling me that we are taking the mickey out of ourselves.

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