The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

I read this in the Delphi kindle product for Mark Twain, which is not clear about which of many possible versions of his unfinished last novel it is. It sounds most like the one described in Wikipedia as the “Paine-Duneka text of 1916,” which is where I get my publication date six years after Twain’s death. Most of his work on it was reportedly done between 1897 and 1900. The Paine-Duneka was slapped together from fragments and various arguably untoward editorial additions, inserted surreptitiously, and it is considered by some to be a literary fraud. So caveats, caveats. What I read more or less worked. Three boys are enchanted by a powerful figure named Satan who hates humanity, often with good cause. He claims to be an angel and a “sinless” nephew of the actual Satan. But he is often casually and astonishingly cruel. In many ways Twain’s conception of Satan here is less as a cackling hooved madman with a pitchfork and more as an irresistible seducer, which ultimately makes him an unnerving character. The three boys love him madly and miss him badly when he is gone. In his spiritual style he is more authoritarian, for example using magic to make it impossible for the boys to speak of him credibly even when they want to. They simply can’t get the words out of their mouths. I thought Twain was formally an atheist, but this is a deeply Judeo-Christian view of the universe, where God is more democratic (if still jealous), granting free will, such as it is. I like that and what I really like is how seductive Satan is. He performs simple miracles for the boys, such as filling their pockets with their favorite fruits, but he works on many readers, including me, with his utterly rational denunciations of humanity. When you’re right you’re right, amirite? Lots of great stuff going on here. Just using the name Satan is bold and effective, continually making us uncomfortable. Then his character. He’s likable. You can even see how people hope he likes them too. He’s like John Wick in his tender regard for animals and ruthless consequences for humans. His idea of mercy is to kill someone quickly. And the boys just go on liking him and liking him. The narrative itself seems to be the most unfinished part. Here it involves lost and found or stolen bags of gold coins and a criminal court trial with a callow attorney. My favorite fragment is the one called “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” where Twain’s great cynical rejections take over. He died a bitter man and there’s some explanation for that here. My sympathies remain all with him.

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

"Thirteen at Table" (1916)

Here is Lord Dunsany doing a ghost story—a pretty good one, typically very short and things out of whack. The usual absurd cruelties work to turn this one into a kind of situation comedy. Never mind about the frame story. On the last day of hunting season the last fox leads the last hunter (and the narrator of this story) on a merry chase all day long and into the gloaming, literally over hill and dale. He never gets it either. Now it's so late he's not going to make it home before dark. He and his assistant and horses must find shelter for the night. Fortunately, their last glimpse of the fox leads them to a strange mansion: "no avenue led up to it or even a path nor were there signs of wheel-marks anywhere." But there's a light in the window so the hunter approaches and knocks. A shabby butler announces him to Sir Richard Arlen, who declines to put him up. The hunter blusters and demands accommodation. Sir Richard politely changes his mind and announces dinner is served at 7:30, in 30 minutes. It's a gloomy scene at the dinner table, "quite in keeping with Sir Richard's first remark to me after he entered the room: 'I must tell you, sir, that I have led a wicked life. O, a very wicked life.'" The dining room is drafty but that's actually ghosts arriving, each one greeted by name by Sir Richard. The hunter decides he must be insane. As dinner is served, it's thus the hunter, Sir Richard, and the ghosts of a group of apparently quarrelsome women seated at table. After the second glass of champagne the hunter decides to humor Sir Richard and pretends to have conversations with the ghosts, who appear to him at best only as shadowy patches of smoky darkness. Eventually he's drunk and raving about the fox he hunted that day. "I was pleased to be able to make the party go off well by means of my conversation, and besides that the lady to whom I was speaking was extremely pretty: I do not mean in a flesh and blood kind of way but there were little shadowy lines about the chair beside me that hinted at an unusually graceful figure when Miss Rosalind Smith was alive." This mostly goes toward convincing us he is drunk, as well as placating his host, but we also know it's a horror story, or at least a ghost story, so these things could be real. Eventually the hunter feels comfortable enough to joke with them, and eventually he somehow insults them all, and they leave the table in a huff. The result is that Sir Richard is freed from his curse and very grateful. The story is neatly done all the way up to and including the Last Supper connotations.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

Read story online.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

The first novel by James Joyce took over 10 years to write. Published when Joyce was 34, it's not a big book. The time was occupied with poverty, drinking, revising, and drafting, not necessarily in that order. At one point it was giant. I read it in my 20s and reread it recently and both times I loved the first half and then felt this autobiographical artist-coming-of-age tale bog down as the main character Stephen Dedalus reaches his mid-teens, when religion swamps his education and fuels a provocative resentment. My favorite sections might be the transcriptions of their lessons on hell, which are vivid and just a little sick: "The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls." The lesson goes on like that for quite some time. Joyce's language all through is singing, vibrant, and concrete, not just on hell, but the narrative is often elliptical, forcing us to construct context and setting from clues. It lands hard on specific points in time, but then skips ahead with little warning beyond new chapters and line breaks. In a general way I share Joyce's resentments about the church, but I certainly don't share his experience. That's mainly what mires me down in the second half, as religion marks and distorts every aspect of his life and especially his education. No wonder he's so pissed off. I would also like to register another complaint about the Modern Library list, which ranks this as third-best novel in the 20th century behind only Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. In other words, two of the top three on the list are by Joyce. As it happens, Joyce is one of the few writers on this list who I think deserves two titles, as opposed to, say, Joseph Conrad (4), Evelyn Waugh (3), Ford Madox Ford (2), and other lapses. For that matter, Joyce doesn't deserve the three he gets—down at #77 we find Finnegans Wake of all things. Did all the voters really reread it to make sure it was as good as they remembered? That position, about #77, is where I think Portrait should go, a worthy and valuable book but not nearly as good as many it's ranked over (The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, and The Grapes of Wrath, to name three in the top 10). Well, file all that under the agony of making lists. The religion aspect of Portrait might make it less interesting to me—in terms of liberating oneself from that particular morass I think Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh is the better novel (or memoir), if decidedly 19th-century and not modern. But Joyce is such a good writer, and so modern, he can obscure things like that.

In case it's not at the library.

Intolerance (1916)

Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, USA, 197 minutes
Director: D.W. Griffith
Writers: Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, D.W. Griffith, Anita Loos, Mary H. O'Connor, Walt Whitman, Frank E. Woods
Photography: G.W. Bitzer
Music: Joseph Turrin (2002)
Editors: D.W. Griffith, James Smith, Rose Smith
Cast: 125,000 men and women, 7,500 horses, Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Miriam Cooper, Walter Long, Margery Wilson, Eugene Pallette, Spottiswoode Aitken, Constance Talmadge, Elmer Clifton, Alfred Paget, Seena Owen, George Siegmann, Elmo Lincoln, Howard Gaye, Lillian Langdon, Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Reid, Donald Crisp, W.S. Van Dyke, Frank Borzage, Tod Browning, King Vidor, Erich von Stroheim

In 1971, Orson Welles hosted a PBS broadcast of Intolerance which naturally he introduced with ringing praise. Then, for a closing segment, he came back, looking as if he had actually watched the film just then too—God knows what version PBS was showing in 1971. But Welles appeared to be still in the throes of it, marveling over its intricate complications, worrying it was too sophisticated for audiences in 1916 and perhaps 1971 too. He suggested some obvious ways people might think it was a failure, or didn't work, but finished, "That failure remains one of the great successes in the history of cinema." My own experience is that I first saw parts of Intolerance in a film class in college—God knows what parts they were in 1981, but I remember the Babylon scenes and yellow tinting. It was the first movie the class looked at and the lesson went toward the same end as Welles's assessment, with art history detail. Intolerance is big in every way—long, complicated, elaborate, teeming, pretentious, convoluted, nearly whirling out of control, especially in the last hour, when it stays on its feet mostly by the expedient of cutting away to one after another of its four ongoing stories—or to blue-tinted Lillian Gish rocking the Walt Whitman, "out of the cradle, endlessly rocking"—cutting back and forth like the guy spinning plates at the top of sticks. It's like 76 open air three-ring circuses have taken over the downtown of your city. Who would think to do it?

Obviously, the tycoon moviemaker D.W. Griffith, son of a Kentucky farmer. But here's the thing. Intolerance always seems to go to the head of the class on all these invention-of-cinema-as-we-know-it-today lists of early movies. I'm writing about it today because it's so high on the big list of movies at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, presently #105 and once as high as #44. Yet two movies that can lay claim to being essential sources for Intolerance are lower—the Italian epic Cabiria, from 1914, does not even make the list of also-rans that takes the list up to 2,000 titles, and Griffith's own Birth of a Nation from 1915 is down at #280. Oh wait, I think I slipped into my assertion sideways there so let me be more straightforward. Griffith's great movie, in this dawn-of-cinema sweepstakes, is The Birth of a Nation. Intolerance muddles up its narrative force for the sake of ambitious cross-cutting experimentation that ultimately does not work. The Birth of a Nation is the birth of epic narrative cinema, practically born full grown. But it's so noxious thematically that there appears to be some tendency to overlook much the same swill in Intolerance, because it's wrapped into the picture a little more discreetly. This is the D.W. Griffith problem.

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917)

I really enjoyed this series of lectures designed to explicate the theory of psychoanalysis and discuss research supporting it. With World War I raging in the background (referred to more than once) and the field of psychoanalysis essentially still in its infancy—or at least very much a work in progress—Herr Doktor Sigmund Freud lays it out. He starts with parapraxes, now known more commonly as "Freudian slips," moves on to dreams, and finally enters into neurotic theory, where it gets a little confusing and heavy on jargon. It's dated insofar as the social norms it assumes so unquestioningly, especially on gender / sexuality issues—he's only a notch above primitive 20th century as often as not, and some wincing should be expected. It is vividly not dated, however, in the grindingly convincing case it makes for an unconscious in conflict with a conscious, a dynamic that defines critical ways we experience reality as basically about the sexual imperative encountering the rational, civilizing imperative. He's very shrewd to argue the case for parapraxes first. He finds examples, in Shakespeare no less, where it is obvious that the phenomenon of self-defeating slips of the tongue, misplaced important objects such as keys, and inexplicable "forgetting" are not just well-known commonplaces of experience, but have also been understood for centuries for what they so often seem to be, evidence of a will in conflict with itself somehow. In Shakespeare, Hamlet misremembers and then corrects himself about how long his father has been dead. A more prosaic example is the joke about the letter home that begins, "Dead Mom and Dad." Freud is so convincing on his elucidation of these dynamics that later, in the last third, when the issues are harder to follow and I more often started to snort and shake my damn head over the fanciful interpretations erupting, it still seemed plausible. In fact, I had to wonder whether my response did not indicate some message in all that mess that I was resisting. Perhaps so. But no, I think it's just heavy on jargon and too many theoretical points (and underpinnings) still in play at the time. It's still a little doughy, or tacky, not even in the oven properly yet. But the lectures are energized by the consideration of exciting and revolutionary ideas. He definitely seems to be on to something. Plus Freud is a very good writer, that's apparent even through the translation of lecture notes.

In case it's not at the library.