The Gilded Age (1873)

Mark Twain's first novel is also the only one in which he collaborated with another writer, Charles Dudley Warner. It gave the era of the late 19th century its name in the US—an enduring one, as we are now well into the sequel, Gilded Age II, though the latter name has not caught on yet. But as a novel The Gilded Age suffers from many faults. The main one is likely fruit of collaboration, with an unfocused story and too many plot threads that add up to too little. The composing strategy was that Twain wrote the first dozen or so chapters and Warner the next dozen or so (of 63 in total). For the most part they alternated chapters after that, though some are said to be worked on by both. Parts of it feel like the parlor game in which stories are invented by one participant at a time and then passed along to the next. Sometimes one person leaves the other in a predicament, perhaps to see how well he will write his way out of it, if he can. They can't always. I know Twain's writing much better than Warner's and recognize him in places such as the appendix. The story is built out of the post-Civil War go-go American economy, fixed on conquering the West for plunder with railroads and mining. Much of it takes place in Washington, D.C., and focuses on the legislative process, riddled with graft. It's exaggerated, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised to find not by much. It's full of melodramatic flourishes too—sudden death, orphans, a woman done wrong, and at least one blatant con man. But they don't do much with the novel, except broadly name the era and identify a long-familiar American identity, the grasping businessman. I'm tempted to say I read it so you don't have to, and for the most part that's true. But for any Twain completists it's interesting to watch him attempt to adapt his journalistic voice, already well developed, to the much more respected arts of fiction. Or maybe fiction was still disreputable then, but Twain always constructed his persona as the knowing but plainspoken sophisticate gently indulging the rubes, from which he never explicitly excepts himself. Part of his shtick, in fact, is that he admits he is merely a rube himself straining for sophistication. Given how bad the corruption under consideration was at the time (at least equally bad now), part of me resents the joking tone. These things look deceptively buffoonish and silly in the moment, all the lies and bribes and other trickery, but they cause serious and persistent harms and aren't really laughing matters, as we saw earlier this month. Now I'm scolding, and this is from someone who laughed very loudly at 1990s tabloid culture. I have some sense that these long-term pernicious effects of corruption were no small part of Twain's remarkable bitterness toward the end of his life.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. (Library of America)

The Way of All Flesh (1873-1884)

I really enjoyed Samuel Butler's posthumously published fictional account of his life, and if it took the fraud of landing on the Modern Library list of greatest 20th-century novels to get me there I guess that's OK. As influential as it might have been for 20th-century youths, however, it was written in the 19th century and it's about the 19th century. I know little else of Butler. I had him confused with Samuel Johnson and thought be belonged  more to the 18th century or something. "The way of all flesh" has a wonderful ring to it, riffing on the biblical line "the way of all the earth." "The way of all flesh" came to English by way of idiomatic Danish and German, but it feels Shakespearean and is now mostly associated with Butler. The Way of All Flesh is a big story of an arguably small man, spanning four generations and proceeding at a stately pace, setting out each generation by turn even as it gradually, almost imperceptibly, zooms in on our hero, Ernest Pontifex. We don't even see him in the first third of this novel. The story, which spends much of its time exploding Victorian hypocrisy in calculated assaults, is strikingly modern. In many ways it's about an individual identity, socially defined, in conflict with its environment. Butler was a lifelong bachelor and if he wasn't gay (a debated point) he certainly understood being an outsider. Ernest comes from a long line of clergy and that is the career expected of him. But Ernest is reflexively individual, a kind of intellectual gadfly contrarian by today's lights. The description of Ernest's treatment by his abusive father is less notable for the physical aspect, simply described as regular beatings, and much more for the detailed emotional stresses inflicted, aided and abetted by his mother. Today more and more we call it gaslighting. Nothing excuses such treatment, but Ernest's insistence on taking possession of his own destiny, with all the inevitable mistakes that entails, was obviously hard for everyone to deal with. In fact, it's the willful seizing of his own destiny that is likely more shocking and influential than his talent, which is modest. Ernest Pontifex is a genuine oddball, an intellectual true to his own self-determined principles. He is described late in this story as a "one book man," which would apply equally to Butler, author of the satirical utopia novel Erewhon and translator of Homer. Ironically, perhaps, Butler is still a one book man, but that book since his death has turned out to be this one, published according to his direction after his death, which came in 1902. The Way of All Flesh was important to A.A. Milne and George Orwell, among others. I had an idea while I was reading that it might have made an impression on James Joyce, who was also shaped by similarly pervasive church forces. Different churches, different cultures, so maybe not. The Way of All Flesh has really wonderful storytelling and a great story to tell. Ernest is strange and lovable in his perverse choices. Overton—Ernest's godfather and the ostensible author of this narrative—frequently refers to him as "my hero," which at first I took to mean the way he expressed "the hero of this story." But he uses it so often I got the impression he might have meant that Ernest was indeed a personal hero. He is for me too now I know his story.

In case it's not at the library.