Mark Twain at the Morgan

In his journal of November 6, 1953, Alfred Kazin remarked that both Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield didn’t like "phonies." The passage is part of the recent Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress exhibition at the Morgan Library, where the curators also quote Kerouac, another Twain admirer, as saying, "[Twain] was an uncomplicated man, a man who did not believe that literature is a constant tale of sorrow and nothing else. Mark Twain piloted steamboats, dug for silver in Nevada, roamed the West, 'roughed it'…worked as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, lecturer, and was a family man—and yet, he did not have to sacrifice all that to his 'art'…. He was just writing what he felt like writing, not what he thought 'literature' demanded of him." The exhibit also devotes some time to Hank Morgan, the firearms foreman who is the hero of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It’s Hank’s love of empiricism and pragmatism that makes him the enemy of the inequalities of the chivalric world into which he is thrust. However, it’s the same traits that enable him to use all his capabilities to destroy himself and Camelot too. That contrariety of motive, which is so aptly underlined in the Morgan Library’s presentation, hardly reflects the workings of an uncomplicated man. Garrison Keillor’s unflattering front-page New York Times Book Review critique of Twain’s recently released autobiography, the sleeper bestseller of the current season, further complicates the question of Twain’s personality by pointing to the disingenuousness of an author whose reputation was based on honesty. As Keillor comments,  "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" ("Mark Twain's Riverboat Ramblings," NYT, 12/16/10).

De Daumier-Smith's Long Blue Period

Jerry Fletcher, the character played by Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory (l997), fills his Greenwich Village apartment with copies of Catcher in the Rye. Of course, the twist lies in the fact that Fletcher, who was modeled to some extent on Mark David Chapman—John Lennon’s killer, who carried a copy of Catcher at the time of the killing and later said the book would explain his actions—is indeed the victim of a conspiracy involving the kind of mind control reminiscent of another classic, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). (Could the youthful Frank Sinatra, who starred opposite Angela Landsbury in that film, have played Holden Caulfield in the movie version of Catcher that will never be?)

    

Though Jerry Fletcher may have turned out not to be truly paranoid, paranoia is certainly part of the epitaph of the author he adored. In a way, Fletcher is a perfect metaphor for J.D Salinger’s enormous following. Fletcher has been damaged by events he no longer remembers, and so he is striking out blindly, manufacturing explanations for a world that makes no sense to him. Yet he finds solace in a literary character. The problems affecting Fletcher are far greater than anything that Holden Caulfield faced, but the same cannot be said about Caulfield’s creator, who might have been, for all his brilliance, one of the great miser’s of all time.

   

Authors copyright their inner lives. However, Salinger behaved as if someone was trying to steal his, slapping a “Top Secret” label on his creatiive life and ceasing to publish at all after 1965. If writing is ultimately about giving, and not just the kind of narcissism that led Salinger to spend the last 45 years of his life writing only for himself, then Salinger didn’t have a philanthropic bone in his body. “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is one of the Nine Stories Salinger published in 1953.  Speaking of Daumier, the nineteenth-century French caricaturist might have been the perfect artist to capture this egregious instance of creative hoarding.