Alaskan Range: Curmudgeonly Writers
..."It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now and then along through life it would not have petrified." ...
So wrote Mark Twain to an editor who had altered one of his manuscripts.
The inimitable Greg Hill tells of Twain and other curmudgeonly writers.
H.L. Mencken ranks among our country's most caustic and accomplished social and political critics, influential columnists, magazine editors, and autobiographers, and he led research into how our national tongue evolved. His most lasting literary achievement was "The American Language,"and while I'll probably never read the entire three-volume set right through, I love dipping in at random and being guided by a master wordsmith while exploring the surprisingly amusing history of American English.
Mencken was also a champion curmudgeon and satirist to whom absolutely no-one's cows were sacred. So when he admiringly mentions another curmudgeonly writer, it's worth noting. To Mencken, Mark Twain was "a literary artist of the very highest skill and appreciation … a destructive satirist of the utmost pungency and relentlessness, and the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion, whether social, political, or religious." Modern scholars of the early 1900s rank Mencken with Twain when it comes to bitter criticism, but he also shared the great author's appreciation for life's humor and absurdities.
Twain was tops in American literature according to Menken. He was amazed that crusty old Twain was a transcendentalist fanboy, writing, "One reads with something akin to astonishment of his superstitious reverence for Emerson … One hears of him … courting Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes. One is staggered by the news … that Walt Whitman thought 'he mainly misses fire.' The simple fact is that 'Huckleberry Finn' is worth the whole work of Emerson with two-thirds of the work of Whitman thrown in for make-weight, and that one chapter of it is worth the whole work of Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes."
H.L. seldom minced words, but neither did Twain. "I like the exact word," Twain wrote, "and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness." And whose writing style did Twain consider among the most admirable? General U.S. Grant's. Former President Grant went into business in 1880 with his son and a scam artist named Ferdinand Ward. Grant thought he was worth millions but often signed business papers without reading them. Meanwhile, Ward used Grant's name in a proto-Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 1884, leaving the general destitute. A few months later Grant was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, but Twain, a personal friend, stepped in and arranged publication of Grant's Civil War memoirs.
Twain had recently established Webster Publishing (his nephew, Charles Webster, was his front) to sell "Huckleberry Finn" on a subscription basis. He generously paid Grant a $50,000 advance and 70 percent of the books profits, and Grant began writing in March 1885. The cancer had spread throughout his body three months later, and he died five days after completing the work on July 18. His efforts to complete the book became a media event, uniformed veterans sold subscriptions for Grant's book door-to-door. It became a best-seller and secured Grant's family's finances.
Why is Grant an adept writer? Twain put Grant's "Memoirs" on equal footing with Julius Caesar's "Commentaries," stating "the same high merits distinguished both books – clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice towards friend and foe alike, and avoidance of flowery speech … There is no higher literature than these modest, simple Memoirs. Their style is at least flawless, and no man can improve upon it."
Twain was particularly prickly about others' attempts to improve his writing. Once he wrote an introduction to a friend's new translation of the French "Joan of Arc Trials and Rehabilitation." Later he learned that the acquaintance, a literary novice, had edited his piece. After reading the corrections, he responded with the posthumously-published "Private History of a Manuscript That Came to Grief." Twain ripped the erstwhile editor from stem to stern. After obliterating every suggested change, he added, "It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now and then along through life it would not have petrified."
But as Menchken warned, "Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."
