A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

So let's be clear--A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is not Mark Twain's best.  In terms of medieval pastiches, Twain's The Prince and the Pauper is far more witty, skillful, and successful in poking at aristocratic pretensions--not to mention it's just a better-told story.

Yankee also suffers from leaning far to heavy on the "tell" end of "show-vs-tell," as well as poorly drawn bare-sketches of characters, pedestrian prose, inconsistent tone, a meandering, hap-hazard story-line,  too easy of satirical targets (serious, the barbaric Feudal system was hardly a much-loved American institution in need of being taken down a peg--shoot, Cervantes was already poking fun at knightly romances in Don Quixote clear back in 1605), over-reliance on astronomical coincidences (i.e. the eclipse), credibility-stretching faith in the ability of a factory foreman to innovate all 19th-century technology from scratch, heavy-handed preachiness, utter lack of introspection, too much self-satisfied smugness in American awesomeness, and swarming historical anachronisms (Britain wouldn't have been called England in the 6th century, the Tower of London wasn't started till the 11th, Castle Warwick not till the 10th, Arthur would've spoken Gaelic, not English, which didn't even exist as an understandable language till the 15th, the droite de seigneur may not have ever even existed outside literature, etc) that betray a lack of basic research into the era on Twain's part, which undermines his credibility.

Also, the novel made me never want to ever read Malory's La Morte d'Arthur, which is quoted liberally throughout.  Sheesh, what a soul-crushingly boring block of prose!


Now, I've read defenses of this novel, that Twain's purpose was to poke holes in the pretenses of the antebellum Southern Aristocrats he knew so well, who based their sense of chivalry and justifications for slavery in the romantic visions of an idealized Feudal Europe that never actually existed.  But again, I think Twain had already sustained this assault on Aristocratic pretentions much more effectively in The Prince and the Pauper.

Now, one might then argue that Pauper was perhaps too subtle in its attacks on aristocracy, and the more direct satire of Yankee was required to make his point clear.  But if his purpose was to attack the South, why not just attack the South directly instead of going side-ways through Medieval England?  And in fact, Twain had already done this through Huckleberry Finn. In Connecticut Yankee Twain is no longer firing on all cylinders.

That all having been said, however,  Yankee is still Mark Twain.  Mark Twain is like Pizza--even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.  Despite my frustrations, I still read the whole thing, and even found myself turning the pages more quickly as the book built up to its climax.

In fact, that's just the thing--in the book's closing chapters, one gets a sense for what this book could've been, if Twain could only have been bothered to quit hammering at his Feudal satire so tiresomely.

For the novel ends, you see, with Arthur dead in the civil war sparked by Guinevere's dalliances with Lancelot, and our Yankee finds all of England turned against him by an edict from the Catholic Church.  30,000 knights in armor charge his position, and he and his motley crew of 52 failed-Republicans destroy the whole of them with mines, electric-fences, and gattling-guns.  The battle is actually an unmitigated massacre on the part of the knights.

Yet there is no smug joy in victory here--there is only acknowledgment of the despair and horridness that comes with such a slaughter, and the emptiness of a win that keeps them trapped among walls of rotting bodies.

Yet more than knights have die that day--all hopes and dreams of establishing a modern Democracy right there in 6th-century Britain are crushed by the Edict, with the sad realization that over a thousand years will pass before another chance will arise, and that Britain is doomed to make all the same mistakes again in that slow and painful march to freedom.

That is, there is a sense of fatalism, despair, and futility running through the end of this novel.  All victories are hallow, all wars are unjust, all heroes are fallen.  Homer's Iliad was already saying the same thing 3,000 years ago, and in a strange way, Twain's Yankee, while mocking the whole rest of epic conventions, has still here preserved the same sense of melancholy that permeates the best of these epics.

That's what this novel could've been, you see--a meditation on not only what was false in Medieval epic, but also all that was true.  These epic poets may have been wrong about the Romantic aspects, but they were dead right in their acknowledgement of the injustice of the world and the fickleness of fate and fallen-state of man.  If we read these ancient epics and find these knights romantic, then we've missed the point; but if we read these epics to understand how they understood the same sadness that we feel, then perhaps that was the point all along.  Twain (and Cervantes) perhaps attack not a genre, but a misreading of the genre.

And then the epilogue itself!  Yankee's framing device is the author is reading a manuscript given him by a mysterious American visiting Castle Warwick.  A spell from Merlin sent him sleeping for 1,300 years, only to arise again in our present day (Merlin, upon gleefully completing the only successful spell of his career, is promptly killed on an electric fence).  The author, upon completing the manuscript, beholds the mysterious American on his death-bed, and in visions cries out for his wife and child from the sixth-century that he sees himself finally reuniting with.

For some reason, though I found the novel as a whole average at best, that final scene deeply moved me, and I've been trying to pin-point why.  I mean, we hardly met his wife over the course of the novel!  Twain was too busy in his endless, tedious task of parodying the Dark Ages to show how a man might in fact set down new roots, try and find a new life, in the ancient past. 

In a way, this novel could've been a Kafka-esque meditation on the capriciousness of fate and strange punishments meted out by a seemingly indifferent Universe.  Why does he get a wife only to lose her?  Why is he sent back in time 1,300 years if he can't change anything?  Why do all his most noble plans and benevolent intentions fail so totally?  How does it feel for a man once second only to a King to be betrayed so completely, and forgotten by history so thoroughly?  How might that break a man?  How might that make him long for the only true love he's ever really known?

Skirting around the edges of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a far more interesting book than the one we got.  Twain buries this more interesting book under endless layers of easy satire and tiresome parody, but even he can't keep it completely buried.  Like the Yankee who did finally re-arise in the 19th century to have his story told at last,  this far more interesting novel on the human condition cannot stay completely buried--it does finally peak out in the end, and does not let you walk away from the book without pondering your mortality and the love alone that matters after all things fail.

Mark Twain Explains Why Super-Inflated CEO Compensation is Nonsense

"There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves that a hard day's intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other.  But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty days."
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

On Shakespeare's Grave

If Shakespeare were an American, we'd call him an all-American success story.

The son of a debt-wracked, piss-tanning glove-maker, raised in rural hickville one-horse Stratford-upon-Avon, William's a rambunctious youth who knocks up his fiancee three months before the wedding, is caught poaching on private property, and to escape arrest runs away to London (2 hours by National Rail but much longer by foot).

London of course was a rain-cursed city with no sewage, no social-services, and roughly the population and prestige of contemporary Kansas City.  It's not even Portland.  Not that he could go anywhere else--England at this time is the back-water of Europe, barely beyond the Dark Ages.  We presume Shakespeare arrived in this sorry excuse for a Big City penniless, broke, without friend, connection, or health insurance.

William somehow lands a job with some actors (commonly acknowledged to be immoral, lying, pandering lowlifes), and then disappears from all historic record...

...then re-appears, wildly successful at everything he touches.  Through sheer grit, determination and talent, he authors a full roster of block-buster plays beloved by the public and respected and envied by his peers; so impressive is his pen that he scores an aristocratic patronage for his sonnets and long-poems, lest any accuse of him of being a "mere" playwright; the box-office will make him so fabulously wealthy that he wears the most expensive clothing, gets his portrait painted (twice), buys a royal crest for his father's family, and becomes an investor in a London bridge; at the peak of his career, he writes and performs for the Queen of England personally, and that at a time when England itself ain't doin' too shabby--in William's time, England defeats the undefeatable Spanish Armada and colonizes Virginia.

That is, England is a rising power, and William a rising power within a rising power.  He is beloved by Monarchs and Commoners alike.  He's done it all, he's made it, risen to the top, he's lived the American dream, all that and he probably isn't even aware that history will rank him among humanity's all-time greatest writers.

And that's exactly what blows my mind--after accomplishing all this, at the top of his game, he returns to Stratford-upon-Avon, that hickville one-horse-town of his youth he couldn't run away from fast enough.

He voluntarily returned.

That's the thought that crossed my mind as I stood before Shakespeare's grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford: Shakespeare had everything in London, fame, riches, popularity, prestige, and yet as he approached middle-age, he still chose to leave it all behind to return to podunk Stratford-upon-Avon. 

Why?  We can only guess of course--nostalgia perhaps; maybe also to rub his success in the face of the local nobles a bit, too; maybe to retire far from the hustle and bustle of the big city; maybe he just wanted to be buried in the same Holy Trinity Church where he was baptized.

Holy Trinity is still a functioning Church, by the way--when my brother and I visited Stratford on Sunday, we actually couldn't visit his grave because the Church was busy holding regular worship services.  Cause it was Sunday.

Which just charmed and thrilled me so much, you see--that it's still a Church, and still acts like a Church.  The whole rest of Stratford is in the utter thrall of Shakespeare tourism (I don't begrudge them; without the pilgrims, Stratford would still be a one-horse hickville), with monuments and book-stores and souvenir shops and royal theatres and "authentic recreations" tripping over each other.  And that's fine.

But Holy Trinity is still a Church.  There is no bookstore and souvenir shop adjacent, no "authentically recreated" museums and so forth.  There are morning prayers and Sunday services and a newsletter and youth groups and competition with the local Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses for members and a graveyard and, oh yeah, if you'll kindly follow the sign, there's William Shakespeare's grave over there, behind the knave.  2 pound donation if you please, to assist with this old chapel's upkeep.

Get there early enough, you'll have the whole place to yourself.

I guess the whole experience of standing before his country-church grave just sort of humanized Shakespeare for me in a new way--not merely to banally realize that he did in fact really live and even has real flesh and bones rotting in the ground (I already knew that), but to see that for all his genius for poetry, psychology, genre, history, for all his profound and unsentimental understanding of nature and mankind and of all our joys and fears and sins and dreams, that he was still a man who was under the vulnerable sway of very human (even quintessential) desires.

That is, in the end, William Shakespeare just wanted to go home.

And he did.

Some Brief Reflections on Stonehenge

You don't go to England to feel young again.  Quite the inverse, in fact.

I don't mean this as a knock on England, simply an adjustment of what sort of travel experience you're hoping for.  I went to Madrid and Paris last year, you see, and young again is precisely what I felt--the incredible food, the stunning architecture, the beautiful people, all made me feel refreshed, revived, rejuvenated, and all other manner of re-. 

London will not make you feel that way--at least, not at first, and not in the way you expect. Everywhere you turn reminds you not only of England's antiquity, but the world's: Westminster Abbey is cluttered with the musty-tombs of men who once commanded kingdoms, but today can't command the attention of indifferent tourists on their way to see Chaucer; the British Museum is filled with the remains of empires once-awful-long-forgotten--Assyria, Egypt, Persia, etc--all inconceivably powerful in their time but now so long gone as to feel unreal, and all collected by an Empire upon whom the sun was also supposed to never set but since has; all while Big Ben keeps time as unhurriedly and morosely as the Thames. Among all these artifacts, one begins to feel part of the whole endless, weary drama of human folly, tragedy, and vanity.

One is confronted with this antiquity head-on at Stonehenge, outside Salisbury.  Here is a Neolithic structure that predates the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Romans, even the Druids.  Whoever built it put themselves to great and impractical expense, effort, and sacrifice to construct it.  It feels sacred, in fact, for those very reasons.  

Of course it was a Temple, is all I'm saying.

And as utterly (and inevitably) touristy and roped-off and ticket-boothed as that World Heritage Site is now, and as bitingly cold was the wind and poorly-prepared my clothes on the day I visited it, I still insisted that we walk around it twice, and I wish I'd walked around it a third.  It filled me, quite simply.  I felt very keenly then how old this place is, how old Britain is, how old is the world, humanity, existence, how very and utterly brief our time on this earth is. 

But somehow that made the place feel all the more recent and new.  "All is as only one day to God, and time is measured only unto man," for if there are no other markers for judging time, then time really does disappear.  I felt co-present with this piece of deep-antiquity, and that's what finally made me feel young again.  Not the same way Paris did, not by a long shot...but the effect was the same--I felt refreshed, revived, rejuvenated.

England came alive for me more after that encounter.  On out last night in London, we revisited Big Ben by the Thames again, and this time that morose and unhurried time-keeping filled me, like I was afraid it wouldn't but finally did.