New Book Review

Make sure you read WC Long's new book review on Mark Twain's Joan of Arc. (Look under "More Fun" post below).

Babies, Children, Dogs, My Mother Have More FUN

Merry dances, singing along with the words of Fly Me to the Moon. Her hands are clasped in front of her, knees bending as she steps back and forth to the rhythm. Elspeth and I are watching her through the crack in the pocket doors. I'm afraid that when Merry sees us she'll become self-conscious and stop her performance.

Let me see what life is like on Jupiter and Mars. . .

Elspeth knows nothing about surreptitious watching. Soon she begins struggling to get down and I pull the pocket doors open, sure that Merry's earnest face will quickly crinkle into an embarrassed smile.

In other words, hold my hand. . .

Merry surprises me. She doesn't flinch at our entrance. She just sings on, and if anything, she's even more animated.

Children. We adults stand in awe and some jealousy at the wonderful turn of their imaginations, their sheer delight that is not compromised by the presence of others. (Didn't Madeleine L'Engle say she really DID float down her grandmother's stairs?) I don't want to see Merry's ability to engage fully in a moment crack as she becomes older.

Of course mine did. It took me a whole pile of painful adolescent years until I was able to act without agonizing over myself. I could have been in the middle of the woods on a hike and still labor under the illusion that I was being watched, weighed, and measured.

People seem to have this crippling self-awareness in different measures. Okay--right now, take your self-consciousness and subtract it from yourself. What you have left over is the amount of sheer FUN you will glean from life. It follows, then, that babies, children, dogs, and my mother have a bigger allotment of FUN than do the rest of us.

My mother used to come to our classes in late elementary school at Thanksgiving to tell the story of the Mayflower. She would roll popcorn balls for our class the night before, and then, as I sat in the front row, she'd don an old cap over her brown hair. Suddenly she would be Frances, young girl on the Mayflower ship, rolling with the ocean waves and eating weevil-bread. Most of me was wildly proud of my mother as I helped to hand out popcorn balls after her dramatic soliloquy. But a tiny part of me was embarrassed at the carefree way she lunged her face toward the audience, the way she folded her hands and squeezed them between her knees. My classmates just thought I had a great mom.

My mother is a powerful storyteller and speaker. One of the biggest reasons for this is that she doesn't get in the way. When she speaks, you let her words and the images she unfolds wrap around your imagination like huge wings. And as you listen, you fly with her story. There is no snuffling, pretentious person getting in the way, only the voice bearing the words; there are no false apologies or self-conscious gestures to make you remember that the story that so intrigues you is coming from a very talented storyteller. You only remember my mother when the story is over. See, THAT's the mark of a good storyteller.

My mother is able to live life this way, too. She always had enough spontaneity to more than cover the rest of us self-conscious, serious sods. If I want a real reaction, I go to my mother.

Most of my life, I strove to be just as spontaneous as my mother. But of course you see the problem already.

I'm a limp, failed storyteller. When I tell a joke I mix up all the details and let the punchline slip early. I apologize for myself and make my listeners wait while I retrieve a word that slipped out of my head and into the abyss. Writing is the only way I can chuck myself completely out of the way. I write, or I hope to write, like my mother speaks. Often I live life standing to the side of myself, jotting down notes to use later. Some of my most genuine spontaneity occurs when I sit down with those notes and begin to relive them on a page.

This is not always true, and certainly having children has loosened me up and stretched me out (in more ways than one). Watching your own children brings back much of the excitement and selflessness of your own childhood.

Elspeth, my one year old, loves with great spontaneity. She toddles across the room and throws her arms around my neck. And parent love is also spontaneous. My love rushes unbidden from my pores, seeping into her little body and strengthening her for all of life. In this way, in this artless love, I am just like my mother.

CONTRIBUTOR REVIEW: JOAN OF ARC BY MARK TWAIN

Joan of Arc

Mark Twain
Ignatius Press; New Ed edition (September 1989)


For someone familiar with Twain, this novel will seem a bit odd as it has none of his classic wit or biting sarcasm. Indeed, it was originally published under a pseudonym because Twain thought that people would expect these things from it and be disappointed. To be truly honest, this reviewer understands Twain’s reluctance to be associated with it, as this foray outside of his usual writing style was not his best work.

The narrator of the story is eighty-year-old man writing to his grandnephews. He was a childhood friend of Joan’s, who later became her secretary, and finally the recorder at her final trial, and thus represents a firsthand witness to all the important events of Joan’s life. His narration is colored throughout the story by an almost idolatrous esteem for Joan; he never married and it is suggested that this is because he never found a woman who could live up to her. This esteem is not a problem in itself; indeed, the reader can hardly help but admire Joan nearly as much as the narrator does. The problem is that the admiration taints the style of the storytelling. The narrator is constantly padding every part of his story with extraneous praise for Joan; barely an incident passes without him adding a comment reminding the reader that what Joan had done only served to highlight what a sublime creature she was. This is disappointing because Joan’s character is perfectly obvious from the story itself, and the added commentary only distracts. One only needs to be shown; the telling is redundant and tedious.
A second problem of the style is that the reader is never excited by what happens in the story. A good writer of historical fiction should make events of the past seem as thrilling as they were when they first happened, even if the reader knows how the story ended. Alas, Twain seems incapable of making any of the many battle scenes exciting, which is a pity as there are so many of them. The main problem is that the reader is consistently told what the outcome of all the events is going to be well beforehand, and it is usually oft repeated. Joan is injured in one battle, and he lets us know about the wound-to-be three weeks ahead of time, repeating the news of its advent so often that by the time she is actually struck by the crossbow bolt the reader is simply relieved.

The book is not without merit, however. Twain meticulously researched the subject before writing the story, reading the official records of Joan’s several trials, as well as many accounts of her life from both the French and English perspectives. So while the style may be wanting, the story itself seems as faithful to the record as possible, and thus gives the reader a fascinating glimpse into this little part of history. More importantly, what emerges from the story is the giant character of Joan herself and the model of faith and hope that she was. This seems to be what fascinated Twain about the story; he saw in Joan a larger-than-life persona and a faith that he could not entirely understand, and he wanted to capture that in a story. In this he succeeds, and the story, for all its stylistic flaws, is worth reading if only because Joan, at least as she is portrayed by Twain, is a person worth understanding and admiring.

--Reviewed by William Christopher Long
W. C. Long is, at this VERY moment, finishing his PhD in Marine Biology at VIMs University in Virginia. When asked what the heck he really does with all his time, Chris wrote: "To be pedantic, I take the clams, and mark them (the shells have to be dry otherwise the sharpies won't work) and then transplant them into the murky black York River." In his leftover time, WC enjoys his adventerous daughter and her as-yet invisible sibling.