Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  En he listen—en listen—en de win’ say (set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), “Bzzz-z-zzz”—en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear a voice!—he hear a voice all mix’ up in de win’—can’t hardly tell ’em ’part—“bzzz-zzz—W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?—zzz—zzz—W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-ld-e-n arm?” (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

  En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, “Oh, my! Oh, my lan’!” en de win’ blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos’ choke him, en he start a-plowin’ knee-deep towards home mos’ dead, he so sk’yerd—en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it ’us comin’ after him! “Bzzz—zzz—zzz—W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?”

  When he git to de pasture he hear it agin—closter now, en a-comin’!—a-comin’ back dah in de dark en de storm—(repeat the wind and the voice). When he git to de house he rush up-stairs en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years, en lay dah shiverin’ en shakin’—en den way out dah he hear it agin!—en a-comin’! En bimeby he hear (pause—awed, listening attitude)—pat-pat—pat—hit’s a-comin’ up-stairs! Den he hear de latch, en he know it’s in de room!

  Den pooty soon he knows it’s a-stannin’ by de bed! (Pause.) Den—he know it’s a-bendin’ down over him—en he cain’t skasely git his breath! Den—den—he seem to feel someth’n c-o-l-d, right down ’most agin his head! (Pause.)

  Den de voice say, right at his year—“W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n—arm?” (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor—a girl, preferably—and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached exactly the right length, jump suddenly at the girl and yell, “You’ve got it!”

  If you’ve got the pause right, she’ll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out of her shoes. But you must get the pause right; and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.)

  Most of Twain’s best humorous stories can be used, and were used, both on the platform and in print. But they diverged significantly in detail. One of the most characteristic concerns Jim Blaine and his grandfather’s champion ram. The narrator has to be “liquored up when he tells it,” and the point of the story is that he gets so diverted onto sidelines and other issues and characters that he never reaches the point. This is a very dangerous anecdote to tell, as it is easy to bore the listeners and lose them; and it is still more dangerous to put into print, as the bored readers have merely to turn the page and pass on. Transforming a rambling, pointless, stream-of-consciousness bore into something funny requires great art, and not many writers possess the skill. Shakespeare uses the device successfully with Polonius in Hamlet; and so does Jane Austen with Miss Bates in Emma; whether James Joyce does it with Molly Bloom in Ulysses is a matter of opinion. Twain could and did do it, because of the fertility of his irrelevant narrative items and characters, but it is significant that in delivering the story of the champion goat, which originally appeared in print, on the platform he gradually introduced significant variations, to get laughs and sustain interest. When the spoken version was written down and he compared it with the original, he was amazed at the differences (or so he says; one is never sure when Twain is being frank).

  Some of Twain’s funny devices simply do not work on the platform, as he discovered. For instance, there is his brilliant little work “The Diary of Adam and Eve.” This, like the running gag, is a prime example of another Twain comic invention—the war between the sexes. Earlier authors, such as Molière and Sheridan, had hinted at the topic, and Shakespeare had devoted an entire play to it, The Taming of the Shrew. But Twain stood the perpetual joke on its own feet; made it into an independent, entire, complete comic turn on its own; and did this with such skill that the show has run and run ever since. But Adam and Eve is not a platform show. It depends for its effects on quiet irony and must be read. Here is Adam’s diary on the subject of Eve and fish in the river:

  This made her sorry for the creatures which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues to fasten names on to things that don’t need them and don’t come when they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence to her, she is such a numskull, anyway; so she got a lot of them out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm, but I have noticed them now and then all day, and don’t see that they are any happier there than they were before, only quieter.

  Irony and ironies within ironies were used constantly by Twain in virtually all his works, often with a delicate sleight of hand that escapes all but the most attentive readers. With irony went the one-line joke, for which Twain had a genius. The one-liner has become the pivot of American humor, and it would be nice and convenient to argue that Twain invented this device. But that would not be true. Benjamin Franklin has some claim to being the inventor: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes”; and his remark on signing the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” And the one-liner became a feature of American politics in the generation after Franklin, Henry Clay being a notable exponent of the art, as was his enemy Andrew Jackson, who said on his deathbed: “The only thing I regret is that I didn’t shoot Clay and hang Calhoun.” When Twain was a young man, Lincoln was also dealing wholesale in the one-liner. But Twain was the man who made the one-line joke universally popular and respected, as a prime feature of American life. He used it as an eye-opener in short stories—the first sentence in “A Dog’s Tale” is “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian.” He used it with enormous success for chapter-head quotations in his “dark novel,” Pudd’nhead Wilson. (These are allegedly from Wilson’s “Calender.”) If possible Twain liked to begin and end a story with a one-liner. I have counted over 100 one-liners scattered through his works. The true total is probably nearer to 1,000. Characteristic examples—both as to sentiment and as to construction (syntax, etc.)—are: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” “Man is the Only Animal that blushes. Or needs to.” “Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.” “Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” There is also his comment on the appearance of his obituary in a New York paper: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Twain used one-liners in his books and on the platform. Some he made up as he went along. Others he sweated over.11

  Twain was in some ways a serious man, and he wanted to leave the world a better place than he found it. So he held opinions and espoused causes. He thought, for instance, that Chinese immigrants and blacks got a raw deal, and said so, often. But he was not an idealist or an ideologue. When the Civil War came and gave him the chance to behave nobly, he hoofed it west after a mere fortnight in the Confederate army. Twain was essentially an entertainer. He felt that getting people interested and making them laugh were what he was best at, the surest way to make money, and his best contribution to the health, wealth, and happiness of mankind. As I noted earlier, he was not a novelist, poet, playwright, writer of philosophy and history, or travel writer, though he posed as such. His books are all entertainment.

  For example, his autobiographical account of his youth in Nevada and his early journalism, Roughing It, is not a structured book, and its supposedly chronological order is misleading. My analysis of its contents shows that it consists of twenty-seven major anecdotes, and many other minor ones, plus a certain amount of topographical ballast or padding. The stories are as follows: virtues and vices of the Allen pistol; the talkative heifter (woman); the camel that ate overcoats; slumgullion; the coyote and the dog; Bemis and the buffalo; the Pony Express; Slade and his murders; Digger Indians; Mormon beds; Horace Greeley and Hank Monk; the escape of the tarantulas; the adventure on Lake Tahoe; the Mexican plug (horse); silver fever; gettin
g lost in the snow; the great landslide case; horrors of the alkaline lake; Buck Fanshaw’s death; running your own private graveyard; important hangings; Jim Blaine and his grandfather’s ram; Chinese virtues; a dueling editor; the delights of California; being in an earthquake; the wisdom of Tom Quartz the cat. Then, in Chapter LXII, Twain takes off for the Pacific and remains there, the business of roughing it disappears, and the book ends not with a bang but with a series of exotic whimpers. The work, in short, is thrown together with no regard for shape or cause and effect—or truth, for that matter. It stands or falls simply by being readable or not. I find it one of the best books I know and have read it, or dipped into it, many times.

  If we analyze Twain’s other great piece of autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, we find essentially the same pattern: a score or so of major anecdotes; many minor ones; some padding. It is entertainment and most of it could have been delivered onstage. (Though as Twain himself noted, with books you may skip, but with lectures “you must hear the fellow out or leave altogether. I do not recommend mounting the platform.”) Twain’s two best-known books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece, are also, when inspected closely, compilations of anecdotes. Each has more in common with The Pickwick Papers than with, say, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, or Portrait of a Lady. It is true that Huck Finn’s relationship with the escaped slave Jim gives the book unity and a purpose, rather as Pickwick’s refusal to truckle to the lawyers who involve him in Bardell v. Pickwick gives his adventures a plot and a climax. But the enjoyment, both in Pickwick and in Huckleberry Finn, consists essentially in the anecdotal episodes. Both are great works of art: unplanned, rambling, artistically irresponsible, and chaotic. They work, and work superbly, because of the authors’ inventive genius and sheer creativity.

  In the end, creativity is what matters in art. Because of his central position in American literature, Twain has been much studied, not to much effect. There is a large Twain industry in academia. Much of it, in recent decades, has revolved around the question “Is Huckleberry Finn a racist book?” It is certainly not a politically correct book. After looking carefully into Twain’s views on blacks, their rights and wrongs, their place in society and how it could be improved, I came to the conclusion that, in all essentials, he had the same views as his older contemporary Abraham Lincoln. Like Lincoln, he was not obsessed with race (as we are supposed to be, and as a bossy minority actually is); rather, he was obsessed with justice. But, like Lincoln, he liked to laugh and make others laugh, and in Twain’s case laughter had priority even over justice, as a rule. That is all one can say about it. Huck’s Jim is the first penetrating and sympathetic portrait of a black in American literature (if we except the doubtful case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). There are faults in the book—there are faults, often grievous, in all Twain’s books—but they are outweighed by its astonishing beauty, authenticity, and (despite all Twain’s efforts) truth. In 1885 the library board of Concord, Massachusetts, voted not to buy Huckleberry Finn, on the grounds not that it was “racist” but that it was “the veriest trash.” But as Ernest Hemingway noted, two generations later, “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing so good since.” An exaggeration, no doubt. But not by much. Every American writer has read it. It has influenced each, one way or another.12 The whole of Twain’s vast, sprawling, dog-eared, careless, infuriating, delightful, and inspired output forms a great mountain of detritus which straddles the high road of American writing and forces those involved in it to pick their way over or through it. It is the basic fact of American literature. Hemingway learned from it. What American writer of his times, or since, has not? It is impossible to imagine the American musical without Twain’s influence, often at second or third hand—or such institutions as Disney, Time magazine, Reader’s Digest, or the New Yorker. James Thurber’s The Night the Bed Fell is a literary grandchild of Twain’s. Indeed all of Thurber’s work springs from the fields Twain first tilled. It was the same with Dorothy Parker, who honed and polished the one-liner till it shone brightly, even in Hollywood. There was an element of Twain in the Marx Brothers and Raymond Chandler. Twain’s tricks made an entry into the White House, taking up themes Lincoln had left behind, in the age of Theodore Roosevelt, whose “Speak softly and carry a big stick” is pure Twain. (So, for that matter, is his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”) Even the priapic John F. Kennedy at his (very rare) best has a twang of Twain. And the great Ronald Reagan occupied the White House for eight memorable years almost entirely in the Twain spirit. He communicated, he governed, by jokes, nearly all of them one-liners, of which he had, literally, thousands, graded and stored in his capacious showman’s memory. A typical one, with its powerful element of truth (as with Twain’s), was: “I’m not too worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.” If Twain was the stand-up comedian of literature, Reagan was the stand-up comedian of the cold war, finally bringing down the curtain on that long historical episode.

  Some years ago the Oxford University Press had the inspired idea of reprinting by photocopy all of Twain’s books in their original format and type, together with their old illustrations, and with perceptive introductions added. I secured a copy of this twenty-seven-volume set at an amazingly low price, and it has been more frequently used, ever since, than any comparable series in my library. The way this audacious, vain, unscrupulous, untruthful, appalling man has survived into the twenty-first century is a wonder. It shows that, in the written and spoken word, you can’t beat the ability to create out of thin air.

  11

  Tiffany: Through a Glass Darkly

  LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY (1848–1933) is an artist worth looking at not only because he was the greatest creator of glassware of modern times, perhaps of all time, but because he takes us into the mysterious and arcane world of glassmaking, the least understood of the crafts. Making fine glass is an extraordinary mixture of creative skill, science, and accident. Humans have been making glass for over 5,000 years; but only quite recently did they discover the chemistry of what they were doing, and there is still a large element of unpredictability in some of the processes. Few people in the art world fully understand glassmaking, be they collectors, dealers, art historians, or curators of museums, even those with large glass collections. Many people go on guided tours of Murano but gawk and pass on none the wiser. The few people who do understand glass, and even write about it, tend to be fanatics, and their accounts are often incoherent, dotted with the strange vocabulary of the craft—slumping, marvering, claw beakers, tweaking, pontils, pucellas, parisous, prunts, lehr, glory hole, annealing, and trailing. Some of the terms are thousands of years old.1

  Tiffany’s own story, and its aftermath, is a bizarre tale of artistic fashion—a poor man who collected Tiffany’s stuff sixty years ago would be a multimillionaire today. One reason for the enormous prices now paid for these works is that art nouveau, the prevailing mode for most of Tiffany’s career, was totally eclipsed for over a generation, vast quantities of it being destroyed, often deliberately. Both of his palatial homes, containing the best of his art, were sold off and demolished. No other modern style has had such a low survival rate, and Tiffany’s work suffered more than that of any other designer working in it. Of course glassware, being fragile, suffers more from time and chance than any other artifact, except gold work, which is melted down during hard times. Thus of Benvenuto Cellini’s output, the only major work that has come down to us is the salt of Francis I (and even that has now been stolen, from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum). Tiffany has not suffered quite so much, but it is likely that only about 10 percent of his ware has been preserved, and many of his unique pieces have vanished forever.

  Glass is made from sand or silicon dioxide or silica, with various additives to make it workable. The most common composition is 75 percen
t silica, 15 percent soda, and 10 percent lime. It defies exact definition, and scientists refuse to recognize it as a material. They write, rather, of “the glassy state” and explain it as a substance, regardless of its chemical composition, which has solidified from the liquid state without forming any crystals. Thus at the atomic level it has none of the regular structure of normal crystalline solids, being instead a random network of atomic bonds in the liquid state, which is preserved in the solid state. Therefore glass has been defined, by Keith Cummings, perhaps the greatest contemporary expert, as “a mobile supercooled liquid whose precise viscosity can be controlled by heat.” The artistic consequence of its indeterminate and indefinable chemistry is that glass can be, and always has been, made and colored from a vast range of different materials and worked in countless different ways at widely separated places all over the globe. It is therefore possible for an ingenious glassmaker to create his own new kind of glass, and this is what Tiffany did when he invented favrile.

  New kinds of glass are related to the two basic ways of working it: hot and cold. The hot process is analogous to iron-making, the glass or iron being molded when it is still liquid or viscous; the cold derives from jewelry making, and is akin to a combination of sculpture and etching. The Romans, who united the varying glass technologies of the ancient world and pushed glassmaking forward almost to the point of mass production, called hot-glass workers vitrearii and cold-glass workers diatriarii, so distinct were the methods. Susan Frank, whose book Glass and Archaeology is a window into how antiquity made glass, warns that all generalizations about glass run into trouble: “Glass is one of the most complex of substances [and] its scientific study as a disordered, multi-component system is in many ways still in its infancy.”2 Most glass technology and products evolved by accident and were then imitated by craftsmen who did not understand the process. Take drinking glass. Originally people drank from horns, which could not be put down till empty. The earliest drinking glasses were imitative cones—hence the term “tumbler.” The design of the bowl with foot and stem was originally a piece of inspired improvisation, which became classic in the eighteenth century and is still with us today.