introductions
(Chrononauts theme music)
JM:
Good evening. We are back. This is Chrononauts. I'm JM and I am here with Nate and Gretchen. Hope everybody is doing really well. I just wanted to run down our usual platform information and stuff like that. We are available on all of your favorite podcasting platforms. We are at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com where you can find all kinds of really cool things, including, now, something we've just started to introduce, episode transcripts. I don't know about anybody else, but certainly there are times when I definitely like to read what someone is saying, rather than listen to them. Generally not podcasts, but sometimes that might be the case, especially if there's useful information being discussed and so on. We just thought it would be a handy thing to have. We don't have too many up there yet, but I think they'll be slowly going up over the coming while. It might be a slow process because the transcription software is not perfect, so we do have to go through them all to make sure there's no really crazy, unbelievably weird mistakes, as we have seen a few odd things come up for sure.
Nate:
Certainly have.
JM:
But it's really not bad.
Nate:
No, it's quite impressive actually.
JM:
It is quite impressive, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, we're going to try to shoot to get one segment up every week or so, so it'll probably be a several month-long process. So if there's any particular segment that you would like to see go up first, just send us an email or leave us a comment on one of our platforms.
JM:
We're going to go from newest to oldest, so the priority will be the newest episodes, and eventually some of the really old stuff will be up there too probably. But yeah, so that's a thing that we're doing now. We also have translations from some untranslated, previously untranslated, I should say works into English, and a few other tidbits here and there.
You can find us on YouTube. You can find us on Apple Podcast and Spotify, as well as Google Play. Now, we would like to invite you, if you are listening to the podcast and you like what you hear, definitely comment. Definitely leave us a review if you feel so inclined, because that would really help us out a lot, and we want to get our names out there a little bit more. So yeah, if you like to review podcasts or if you've never reviewed a podcast before and you think that would be a cool thing, most of the platforms do have a space for writing reviews, and I know that a lot of people who are just looking for new things to listen to do tend to gravitate towards reading the reviews, especially on the mobile platforms. So yeah, and YouTube comments are also a good thing. We like those too, and we like the likes and subscriptions, so feel free to do that. You can contact us as well at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com or on Twitter at ChrononautsSF.
That's about all for the platforms, but definitely look out for the transcripts coming and maybe some other cool things here and there.
Nate:
We haven't posted any new translations in a while, but some of the stuff that we've done in the past we're probably going to be covering in the next, I don't know, six or seven episodes, so you can look forward to discussions of a couple of interesting stories, I think, that we probably hinted at in the last couple episodes, but they are coming sooner rather than later, I think.
JM:
Yes, yes, definitely, and there'll probably be more down the road, so stay tuned for all that stuff.
Now, I just wanted to talk about something that is sad news concerning one of the inspirations, I guess, that sort of got me into the idea of doing podcasts in the first place. I mentioned them on the podcast before, it's the Watchers in the Fourth Dimension podcast, and it is a Doctor Who podcast where the hosts are going through all of the Doctor Who television series and essentially reviewing each story and talking about their feelings about it and making comments and having a good time sharing their enthusiasm and a few laughs and so on. It's a really fun podcast, I discovered it in 2019, I believe, early 2019, and I guess, before that time, I didn't really listen to a lot of podcasts, just wasn't really a thing that I ever thought that I would really spend a lot of time listening to, and after that, I kind of branched out a little bit and found a few more that I really liked on a variety of different subjects, and now here we are, doing our own podcast. I guess they're kind of one of the inspirations for making me feel that actually podcasting could be pretty fun, and they were moving right along. Four hosts, friends from Atlanta, Georgia: Anthony, Julie, Reilly, and Don. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Don Smith, their fourth host and their sound guy, passed away, and it was a really sad thing. I talked to Don a little bit online from time to time, and he was a really friendly guy, really funny. He was always kind of the amusing snarky guy on the podcast, but very good-natured about it. He really liked the stories that he was talking about, but his jokes were always on point, and yeah, it was just a really cool personality, made the podcast sound great too, and it's really sad that he's gone.
I don't know what those guys are going to be doing in the future. I think the podcast is sort of on indefinite hiatus right now, because I don't really think that they're wanting to continue now that the team is broken, but who knows what they'll decide to do, but definitely listen to their past episodes. They do really good stuff. They don't just comment on the TV series as well. They've done some cool bonus episodes on things like Hammer Films and the Amicus horror anthology, "The House That Dripped Blood", which stars John Pertwee, and they've done a few Big Finish audios as well. You can find them at watchers4d.podbean.com. Definitely give them a listen, give them support if you like Doctor Who at all, and you just want to hear some fun people do their thing and show them that they're loved.
Nate:
Yeah, our hearts really go out to them. It's really sad news.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. I will miss, I will miss him. I think a lot of people will.
Mark Twain biography, background on Arthurian cycle
(Music: echoing piano and eerie synth drone)
Jm:
And now, without further ado, I think it's time to discuss our author, a very popular author, one of the greats of 19th century American letters, Mark Twain.
Mark Twain, real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is one of the most celebrated American writers of the 19th century. And thus a great deal has been written about him: what he thought, who he knew, what he did. We're really only able to scratch the surface here, and as such, I apologize in advance for having to necessarily leave quite a lot out, especially in connection with his highly regarded classic books, and his busy life of traveling, and all the acquaintances he had all over the world, many of whom were themselves important literary, political, and business figures.
Nate:
Yeah, reading through the biographical materials on him, it's really impressive how many people he actually knew and was friends with. Like, it seems to have known everybody.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And I really, in a short while, I'll go a little bit over some of his background. But there's so many books that have been written about him, even about very specific periods of his life.
Gretchen:
I remember going to my campus library just to see what they had on Twain. And you know, it is just like several like shelves worth of books on like, yeah, very specific aspects of his life.
JM:
Yeah, that's something I noticed too. There's like, I found a couple of books specifically on his interaction with the writer circle in San Francisco, one about the very late period of his life, like his last few years. Definitely ones about his interactions with various early American political figures like Ulysses Grant and stuff. And it just goes on. And so we're really not, we are a science fiction literature history podcast. I don't even think I mentioned that at the beginning, but I was supposed to. But we are that, and we're not necessarily the classic lit biography podcast, although we do try to get into biography as much as we can, because it is more interesting in a lot of cases than I kind of at first thought it would be, especially getting into these figures who have a lot of stories around them and so on. But before we get into that, why don't we just talk about you guys being brought up in the American school system, you probably have more experience with Mark Twain than I do, I would think. What are your experiences with him?
Nate:
So when I was in high school, "Huck Finn" was part of the English curriculum for American Lit. I'm assuming it still is. I don't know, Gretchen, did you have to read "Huck Finn"?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I have read "Huck Finn" twice for classes: once in high school and once for my community college classes. But that is, for me, the only real Twain that I've read outside of "Connecticut Yankee". I know the story of "Tom Sawyer" and I think we've read excerpts from it in class, but I've never read the full novel.
Nate:
Yeah, those didn't come up for me in school either. I've read outside of school the first Tom Sawyer novel. I think there's like four or five of them. It's very popular, so he obviously, you know, cashed in on it for all it was worth. But I've also read "The Prince and the Pauper", which is an interesting precursor to this one, as well as "Pudd'nhead Wilson", which is one of his minor works, but I think it's a really interesting one, because it has a very early use of fingerprinting as a criminal forensics tool. So it's kind of like a neat little footnote, even though I don't know, his more well-known works, I think, are generally ...
JM:
So I don't know how well-known that work is considered, but it comes up a lot in his biography. I think that people consider that to be an important work from him, because it's a late, a late period work. We'll get into that in a bit, but it seems like, in a lot of senses, he was kind of writing potboilers toward the end and getting into some kind of strange territory. There was a lot of stuff that was never published during his lifetime. And so "Pudd'nhead Wilson" is considered kind of his last serious book, and it kind of revisits the slavery concept that is kind of central to a lot of his early work and "Huckleberry Finn", as well.
Nate:
Oh it does, absolutely, very much so.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because I do believe that just from what I've read about Twain or seen about Twain, it does seem that "Pudd'nhead Wilson" comes up in a similar way with "Prince and the Pauper". I think I've heard them kind of get equal attention from at least what I've seen.
Nate:
Yeah, I have this enormous Twain anthology that's just like a book that's almost physically too large to comfortably read from, but it has everything we've mentioned so far, including "Connecticut Yankee", except for "Pudd'nhead Wilson", but it also has a bunch of his non-fiction stuff, like "Innocents Abroad" and "Life on the Mississippi", which I haven't read.
The only other piece that I have read by Twain is "1601", which is an absolutely delightful piece of vulgarity and profanity. It was banned until I think like the 1960s or so, and Twain himself didn't even claim authorship until like several decades after it was written.
JM:
Yeah, well, it was meant to be circulated among his friends. He didn't actually mean that. It's kind of, he had a complicated relationship with controversy. I'm going to get into some of that. But my own experience with Twain starts right here with "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". He's not really featured that much in the Canadian school system as far as I know, but I had one teacher in grade seven and eight who was a fan, I guess, and he thought he considered him an important writer. So he actually had us do a Mark Twain project and we could each pick whatever we were interested in. Those big anthologies that you mentioned, Nate, the big Mark Twain anthologies, I think those were quite popular. My dad has one. I think that's where he read "Yankee" from when I was young.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And I remember that being circulated around in school as well, that big anthology. So I chose this book because I was already sort of familiar with it, even though I was too young to really remember a lot. But that was the second time I read it. So this is actually a book we're doing on the podcast, I believe this is the fifth time that I've read this book. So I've also read "Huckleberry Finn" twice. "Tom Sawyer", I read that once. Most of these are on my own time. I did read "The Prince and the Pauper" as well. And a bunch of short stories. I had the man, was it "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and the "$30,000 Bequest and Other Stories", all this stuff that I got from Project Gutenberg years and years ago.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
I read through a lot of that stuff quite early on. So in my e-reading days. And I feel like I might have read something else. Maybe it'll come up and I'll remember as we go through the podcast. But there's definitely more that I'm interested in reading, especially a book that we'll talk about at the end, which I've heard a lot about from various people, but which I've never actually read, "The Mysterious Stranger".
Nate:
Yeah. And doing, I guess, research for the podcast, he has a couple other short stories which may feature like telegraph, telephone technology prominently. And I think there's some stuff that speculates on future use of that. So we might visit Mark Twain at some other point in the future. I mean, he's certainly be interesting to come back to in that context.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, he definitely has a story about a long distance relationship sort of being carried over romance, being carried over a telephone. So that's kind of felt reading that now makes it feel kind of ahead of its time. I think he was sort of having fun with it, but at the same time said, "Hey, this could be a serious thing one day."
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So it's kind of interesting. But he was a performer. And that's something that is very important to his whole life. And there were those who said of him, he could tell a story much better than he could write it. And he always maintained the southern drawl of his young years, even though he settled in Connecticut and also lived in Europe for a time. Slow talker and a sharp listener. And while he coveted adulation and appreciation among the literary elite, he still had a reputation for an abrasive personality and with strong opinions.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, a town which Clemens described as almost invisible. He was born prematurely and the sixth of seven children. The family moved to the town of Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi. The Clemens family seemed a particularly unlucky one, even for the time with the line being prone to illness and many of them dying young due to either ill health or unfortunate accidents. Sam's own father died when he was 12 and this prompted him to quit school. Sam himself was quite sickly in his early years and his mother thought it was highly unlikely he would survive. He grew up to be a boy who loved pranks and had a very acute sense of hearing and memory. He was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household and, like many young white boys of the time, became friendly with the half-dozen or so black slaves on the farm. The specter of slavery would influence him for the rest of his life and make its way into many of his books, although he did not really become an abolitionist till after the Civil War.
Sam's recollections of his father seemed rather brooding and the humorous side of him came from his mother Jane, whom he seemed to develop a close relationship with despite her early pessimism about his future. The family moved westward, kind of like the Williamsons did, and Marshall, that is John Marshall Clemens, also bought a lot of land that was pretty much useless. Although the Clemens' were a fertile bunch, most of the kids didn't make it. The reports are that the parents' marriage was somewhat loveless, Jane only marrying John to save face and because she was angry at another suitor. John, meanwhile, was stoic and silent. He thought the new land would provide for his family after his death, but he was wrong. One who did make it was Sam's older brother Orion, pronounced "oh - ryan", apparently, and he kind of became the paternal force in the family. He had a wandering spirit, though, and he was not a good businessman either. In fact, bad business seemed to run in the family as well. One of the things Orion set up was a newspaper, and Samuel quickly became an assistant. At 16, he published a sketch about his town in the Philadelphia American Courier, this after some practiced in two of the local papers, writing sketches free of the vernacular which he would later be known for. Clemens started writing and traveling, sending stuff back home and to other papers from New York. He was no stranger to arduous land and river journeys, and during this time he was working as a printer for various papers. For much of his life, Samuel Clemens lived a kind of nomadic existence, never staying in one location for too long. He also famously spent time as a river pilot on the Mississippi, though the only distinguishing thing about this apparently was that he got to use a lot of material for his books, so he didn't really impress the other river pilots apparently. But after the death of his brother Henry in a steamboat accident, he didn't seem to want to carry on with this job anymore.
Samuel served in a Confederate Legion during the Civil War briefly, seems like he deserted. He wrote an unflattering and unheroic account of his time that was published in 1885 in Century Magazine, called "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed".
One thing I noticed about Samuel Clemens is that he didn't much care for violence, so whenever there was a threat of bloodshed, he was out of there as fast as he possibly could run. Orion was secretary of the Nevada Territory and that's where Sam went. There wasn't much pay in being secretary to the secretary though, so he resolved to enter into silver mining as a career. Not as a miner so much though, but as a speculator. In reality, the owning of shares in supposedly rich land was something of a going scam at the time, and Twain himself may have scammed a few people during this time by lying about the providence of feet of land before selling them off. And like with many of his other non-writing endeavors, he didn't make any money at this. Meanwhile, the South was losing the war. Luckily, Sam got a job as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise. Just like in mining, the hoax ruled the roost in the papers, and the two were sometimes connected. Interestingly, he was hired to replace a Dan de Quille, pseudonym of William Wright, who was a satirist. So Clemens concluded satirist play was mostly what he was there for. Samuel Clemens already had a line as a humorist and troublemaker, anyway. Like many humorists of the time, Samuel Clemens needed to adopt a pseudonym. With him it was more special than most, becoming the name he would be known for for the rest of his life, even as he sought to leave the label of humorist behind him.
Earlier sketches were done under various other assumed names, many of which sounded pretty hilarious, and all of which were abandoned. Mark Twain itself comes from riverboating and is slang for not very deep water, basically. Although Sam created another sort of legend around it, and how he stole another man's identity, and made a kind of spooky story of it, but there's no proof that there was anything real in that. But, back to the Enterprise in 1862, his first tale was a scientific tall tale called "The Petrified Man", about the finding of a 100-plus-year-old mummy in very exact and excessive detail, describing how the thing was thumbing its nose at the viewers. The Mark Twain name was used for the first time in 1863 in a letter sent to the Enterprise from Carson City, although we don't know for sure if it was the first time it was used, since some of the early stuff he wrote has been lost. He was sitting in on the Territorial Congress and getting a taste for lampooning politicians. Meanwhile, he kind of got off to a bad start by publishing a pretty vicious hoax that shocked the newspaper readers about a guy murdering his nine children, wife, and killing himself due to losing money. Even though he included what were then the expected clues to alert local readers that a hoax was a hoax, the story was so bloody-minded that it shocked the readers and damaged the paper's reputation for a while. His, "I take it all back", the next day seemed a bit smug and unsatisfying to them, I suppose. And that wasn't his only dirty trick, either.
He published a piece written one night while drunk after hanging out with his mentor, Dan de Quille, claiming that money sent to the Sanitary Commission, which became the Red Cross later, was going toward a miscegenation society, somewhere down east, and the Sanitary Commission was definitely more pro-union and maybe this annoyed Clemens, so he told his sister he had written it under the influence and that it was put on the pile for the editor by mistake. And this whole thing escalated dramatically until Clemens challenged the editor of the rival union paper to a duel and printed a whole correspondence thread in the Enterprise. So what we have here is what I've always called Twain since I kind of started reading a lot of his short sketches. A 19th century example of a troll kind of, something that he really was into doing.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. It's kind of interesting that Poe's life ends around the time that Twain's begins because they kind of feel very much cut from the same cloth just in opposite ends of the century.
JM:
For sure, yeah. I definitely noticed a lot of similarities, even though Poe leaned a little less heavy on the humor, for sure, but he could still be pretty funny.
But his editors stood by him and they remain good friends. His reputation as a humorist was growing and he was known in some quarters as the Washoo Giant. His astute and humorous political reporting made him a favorite. Unfortunately, Orion's time as a statesman was short and he sold his place soon after Nevada became a state in 1864. Clemens borrowed $200 and fled town for California, possibly to avoid the same duel or the ridicule that would result from it. Work was quick to come at the Morning Call, but he chafed under its strictures, which were simply to report the news. Twain the joker, the hoaxter, the satirist wanted to be romping about and the paper wouldn't let him. His big break came in 1865 with "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog", retitled "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County". Any of you read that story?
Nate:
No.
Gretchen:
No, I have not. I've heard of it, but I have not read it.
JM:
It was his big break and it kind of hounded him for a long time. I think it started to annoy him a little bit, but it is a really silly story. I guess it was very popular at the time. It was one of the short sketches that I read, so I don't know. It's, I mean, it's still funny, I would say now, but it's in that vernacular style, which Yankee doesn't really have, but which is what he became known for is that kind of you can picture it in that slow southern drawl and somebody just telling you the story, right? And yeah, it's a really silly story, but it's kind of funny. And it was very important to the development of Twain's career.
Now, he'd already left San Francisco after this point because his roommate, a fellow Mississippian, got arrested for knocking out a friend of the police chief. So Sam effectively went into hiding, but not really as he continued to write weird tall tales, the likes of the "Jumping Frog" story, which was a retelling of something that he heard on Jackass Hill in the mining camps. The story was published in the New York Saturday Post way out east, and it made his fame and was the titular sketch in his first book a couple of years later.
Now, it's here that Mark Twain began a series of travel adventures, almost all of which he would write about. Seems like his penchant for off-color and caustic humor receded through the rest of the 19th century to maybe return a little late in his life during his more pessimistic years in the latter half of the 1880s and beyond. He even became known as somewhat of a wholesome and moral character despite his fondness for sleeping with servants and also girls from the Hawaiian Islands. Once on the way back to Nevada as a lecturer, a hoax was staged on him, a fake holdup, and he wasn't amused, so maybe it gave him a little bit of food for thought as this seems like something he would have tried on someone else. The traveling lecturer and storyteller would be a big part of his thing from now on. Picture him, if you will, short and spare, lounging about the stage with his head of red hair and mustache, a huge cigar chomped in his mouth, acting like the audience wasn't there, his big drawl, an informal manner, a huge draw.
He finally got to go to Europe and the Middle East in 1867 with a ship whose passenger complement included Moses Beach, then editor of the familiar New York Sun. Twain sent back letters to the paper he was working for and the American publishing company, a subscription house, soon got word and contacted him. They became his publisher for over a decade and it's the model he continued to use up until the publication of "Connecticut Yankee", which basically consisted of not selling the books in stores so much but actually having door-to-door book salesmen going around in the little rural communities in the American heartland and stuff, selling the books to people. So this kind of stuff was of course considered lowbrow by the Eastern academia and intelligent elite. So this trip overseas lasted about six months and took Twain and the other passengers all over, from France to Italy and Constantinople and Egypt and the Holy Land. Twain got a lot from it, the foundations for "Innocents Abroad", experience of the world (he didn't seem that impressed with Europe), and several new acquaintances, also in a somewhat indirect way, love. Twain had been developing this kind of this idea for a while that he wanted to marry above his station into a higher social class. He thought this would be good for him and would go with his image of a man cleaning himself up, though he was still known as somewhat of a hard character among his new acquaintances. One of the people who called him that on board ship was Charles Langdon, son of a prosperous New York lumber and coal magnate. Charles wrote letters back home and his description of Mark Twain and his holding court on deck and such intrigued his sister Olivia.
Although it seems Charles tried to dissuade Olivia at first and their father after making inquiries heard negative things about Twain's character, including from the ship's captain, who said he drank too much. It seems eventually they started to court and met not too long after his return to the States.
The Langdons were probably good people, but like many of the abolitionist republican sorts, they were teetotalers and a little bit puritanical for Sam's taste. Nevertheless, he was pretty devoted to Olivia or Livy as she was called and tried hard to be, quote, "a good Christian" for her sake, though eventually had to admit he couldn't really give up his vices: the occasional drinking, the 300 cigars a month.
Nate:
That is a lot.
JM:
Yeah, a lot of smoking. The blatant irreverence and agnosticism. She seems to have resigned herself to this and learned to be okay with it, though. She was prone to many illnesses herself and was often not perceived as strong enough to accompany Mark Twain in his traveling life. Yeah, as far as we know, he was always solidly faithful to her from this time forward. Only one of their four children flourished, daughter Clara. Mark Twain, in an effort to keep a clean populist image, kept a somewhat pious moral exterior, but later writings, some of them unpublished till after his death, like "The Mysterious Stranger", show that perhaps he was always a blasphemer at heart.
At any rate, after a time in Buffalo, which Twain supposedly hated, they settled in Hartford, Connecticut, which Twain had idealized for a while. The town had some literary stuff going on and was considered a rising star of the East in America. They built the Twain mansion, a strange castle-like edifice that was the talk of the town. You can visit it now. And Twain spent a lot of time in the early 1870s away from his wife on tours, much to her chagrin. One of these trips was to England in 1872. He had an idea of writing a book about the English, going back that far, though it never materialized, unless you count the perhaps somewhat juvenile "Prince and the Pauper." The English treated him well, and he discovered he was the most popular American writer abroad. There was no international copyright before 1891, and Twain got right in on this. One of the problems he had was that an English publisher was pirating his work, and even adding stuff to it that wasn't his to fill out the page count. He got around this by making a separate publishing deal with another company and publishing his books in England prior to the US, thus establishing copyright in both countries. But then his stuff was pirated by the Canadians. So it goes.
Nate:
I wonder if any of those bootleg editions with extra text added have been digitized and posted online anywhere?
JM:
Yeah. Apparently this was a big problem with "Tom Sawyer". Some publisher in Toronto just flooded the market with copies of "Tom Sawyer", and he was drawing a lobby that only books printed in America should be sold in the US and so on. So yeah. It wasn't the English that would take over his life in the 1870s when Twain was approaching and entering his 40s, but returned to his boyhood in the South. It's this that prompted his three southern books, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "Life on the Mississippi", and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". These, especially Huck, are probably still considered his most celebrated work. Twain definitely felt the need to present a fairly clean image, yet he had a perverse streak, perhaps. So when he was on his voyage on the ship into Europe and stuff, he had actually written some letters describing in a somewhat non-complimentary way some of his fellow passengers, and this got to the papers. So some of them were not amused, and he had written to his sister, I believe. He had said, "I like these people. They're my friends. They're better than me. I just want to stir them up and make them healthy." So kind of a funny attitude he had, but this kind of came up in a dinner party in 1877 that gets a lot of coverage. I don't really want to talk about it too much, because I don't really know a lot about the figures involved, but it was a party held at the Atlantic Monthly dinner banquet thing, I believe, and there were a bunch of speeches, and the other guests of honor were William Dean Howells, who was kind of like the Dean of American Letters. I believe he published a lot of people, including Mary Wilkins Freeman. Also Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Longfellow, and he basically got up on stage and told a tall tale about them being a bunch of drunks, and he kind of, although apparently they took it rather well, some people in the audience were very, very upset, including Dean Howells, and he had to apologize to everybody afterwards and stuff, and the speech kind of went down in history. Apparently there was a seven course meal, and they were all drinking so much wine that hardly anybody remembers what was said, but that's pretty high hot times among the literary elite, I guess.
But he worked on several projects during the late 70s and had the usual problem of not really being able to focus on any singular thing, with the result that everything was in a state of chaos and incompletion. Interesting footnote, his brother Orion, who was also trying his hand at many things and not able to find The One, that is the one that worked, like his brother, he also tried his hand at writing and sent Clemens a book, which he called an imitation of Jules Verne. He suggested that Orion tried to write a parody instead. He says, "I think the world has suffered so much from that French idiot that they could enjoy seeing him burlesqued". Now, seems possible that Twain could have read the original French if he wanted to, since he claimed to know French, but I'm kind of guessing that he maybe didn't.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know how much French language books, especially those that got translated into English would have made their way to the United States, or how much effort Twain would have put out to seek them out if he didn't like, you know, care for it to begin with.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, at this point, until I guess he kind of went down on the French later in life and kind of castigated them pretty viciously, but he was a bit of a Francophile early on, and if he did teach himself French though, it doesn't necessarily mean he would have read Verne in the original French, so I don't know. Maybe he wouldn't have liked him anyway, but I can see some similarities between them, so I don't really, I don't know what his beef was necessarily, but it sounded like it was a hollow Earth story, and Twain described it to their mother as the hero going down into the center of the earth and having a conversation with a gentlemanly gorilla, and he maintains this was already in one of Verne's books, so, and that Orion was just foolish and unoriginal to want to write such a thing. It's pretty harsh.
But in the late 1870s, they went back to Europe and England and France and they seemed to, again, give him much creative inspiration as well as lots and lots of luggage to take back to their Hartford house. So as we mentioned, Samuel Clemens was always looking for the next thing, and he wanted to be a businessman, possibly more than an artist, and this thing doomed him somewhat. He only really made money with the one invention, which was a scrapbook of sorts with some sticky paper on it that you could just stick things on, your notes or whatever, or pictures, I guess. The big thing for him in the 1880s was something called the Paige Type Compositor. It sank him deep in the hole, and it wasn't the only thing. He took large ownership of a publishing company, bought shares in a railroad, which he then sold at a loss, failed to invest in obvious up-and-comers like the telephone.
Now, the James Paige setup was at the Colt Arms Factory there in Hartford, workplace of Sir Boss Hank Morgan in "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". He was a big investor in the Farnham typesetting company, and it seems like this thing was constantly being assembled and disassembled and demonstrations were scheduled that never happened. It was just a big nightmare, and it took Mark Twain years and years to remove himself from this thing. It seems like it was almost monomaniacal obsession for a while, and I don't know if this inventor was just screwing him along or what, but the thing is there were other typewriters that were in production at that time. I guess this wasn't really a typewriter though, it was like more of a printing machine. Apparently it weighed about 5,000 pounds.
Nate:
Yeah, it was some advancement in movable type, which he thought was going to revolutionize the printing industry, and I guess it didn't really work out.
JM:
Yeah, well, essentially he didn't have a lot of time for writing during this time. He still managed to get out "Huck Finn" though, the book he thought of, and many thought of as his masterpiece, and "Yankee" a few years later, and then "the American Claimant", which also concerns royalty, and he finally managed to disentangle himself from James Paige just before going on a world tour to try and make money to pay back the debts incurred by his bankrupt publishing company.
So later on the family actually moved to Europe, living in Vienna after the tragic death of their daughter Susy. Twain became really interested in health foods and such and started to buy into that, and his late posthumously published work might be of interest going down the road, but we'll see. There's "The Mysterious Stranger", which are stories of Satan and his nephew interacting with modern man. While writing potboilers like another sequel to "Tom Sawyer" and such, he would write the kind of books he thought the world actually needed for his own amusement, books which, "scoffed at the pitiful world, the useless universe, and the violent, contemptible human race". He concluded that to publish such books was authorial suicide, and he had a family to support, but he nevertheless wrote some of it.
"The Mysterious Stranger" consisted of a series of drafts and fragments, the chronicle of young Satan being one of the longest. The final chapters of "Mysterious Stranger" get really, really bizarre and fantastic. Among an increasingly feverish style, we get a woman transformed into a talking cat, and the history of the world made to run backwards. The last sentence he ever wrote in the book was, "then, all of a sudden, 44 waved his hand, and we stood in an empty and soundless world".
So this seems like later on in his life, this real idea of God being some kind of cosmic joker was kind of becoming paramount in his mind, and I don't know, it's a lot of unluckiness, maybe had a lot to do with that. His children didn't do so well for the most part, a lot of them died very young, and I don't know, it just seemed like despite the praise he was getting as a foremost figure in American letters, wasn't exactly a happy life, especially later on.
But that's Mark Twain. There's a lot more we could go into, but I think for the purpose of the podcast, we should stop talking about the man so much, maybe, and get to his actual work, and what we're discussing now, which has an interesting and much older historical precedent.
So this book, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", was possibly germinating for quite a while. I mean, he obviously had strong feelings about the undemocratic principles of royalty. He was no doubt familiar with the romantic novels of Walter Scott, and also received a copy of Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur" in 1884, which was given to him by his friend George Washington Cable when they were on a lecturing tour. I think he was already familiar with this work, and apparently he quite liked it, actually, despite the fact that he lampooned it in this book. He actually did enjoy it and recommended it to his daughter.
Nate:
Yeah, some parts are definitely more enjoyable than others, which I guess we'll get into in a minute.
JM:
It's pretty repetitive for sure, but I think he just, he called it sweet and delightful quaint, and I think he just sort of appreciated maybe the stylistic quality of it or something, or the romanticism, I guess, despite himself. He seems to come down on it pretty hard here, but I think there's a lot of nuance to this, and it definitely that seems like not everybody picked up on the multiple sides of the book, like they just saw it as this big, oh, this big takedown of the British and Europe and pseudo-romantic drivel, and I think, I know, I think there's more to it than that. I don't think that's all he was really getting at. I think it's his feelings on it seem mixed, and I think that makes a lot of sense, because even though, and rightfully so, Twain is known, for example, as somebody who championed the rights of black people after emancipation and so on, and was involved in several progressive causes, you know, he wasn't always universally that way, and he kind of went back and forth on some things like women's suffrage in the beginning, he did not support, but then later on he did, and I think maybe he was just conflicted a lot of the time because he wanted to be this up-and-coming literary person living in the northeast, but he was from this like southern rural background, and his childhood was very different from where he ended up, and I think he talks a lot too about how the American South was influenced by the kind of romantic traditions that he's lampooning in this book. So this was actually my very first exposure to the story of King Arthur. That's really, really strange. Now that I think about it, it's pretty strange.
Nate:
Yeah, I think my first exposure was the Disney film, "The Sword and the Stone", which was the, I guess, their adaptation of the first novel in T.H. White's "Once and Future King".
JM:
Yeah, that's right, that's a cool story for sure.
Nate:
It is, definitely very kid-friendly too.
JM:
Yeah, the book is really good, the book is not all of the same tone, it's the lighter parts or a bit more somber.
Nate:
They are, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, so obviously you're familiar with the book, Nate?
Nate:
Yeah, I've read the novel, yeah. I've read it, I don't know, within the last five years or so. So, somewhat recently, but not like terribly fresh in my mind.
JM:
Right, interesting. Gretchen, what about you? How did you first hear about all this stuff?
Gretchen:
To be honest, I don't really have too much experience with like media that covers the Arthurian legend. I feel like a lot of what I know about King Arthur was things I just kind of picked up through cultural osmosis and like references to it in various like other pieces of media that wasn't necessarily focused on the legend. So, I don't really have any specific point where I can say like when I actually learned it. I just kind of over the years picked up the characters and like the dynamics between certain characters and the plot points. But nothing that really was the legend itself.
Nate:
Certainly a lot, a lot of modern media that references it or parodies it or does something with it in some way. And it's really astounding because the whole cycle spans more than a thousand years and it's still going quite strong. They were just made a Green Knight movie recently. I was looking up adaptations of Tristan and Isolde and apparently they made one with James Franco like not too long ago which I had no idea about. The reviews are kind of mixed but yeah, I mean the various pieces are still being churned out. But yeah, it's just kind of fascinating the whole history of the thing. The history is like really, really huge even going back into medieval times.
JM:
Yeah, now obviously I'm not familiar with much of that. I did read a bit of the Malory years ago. My friend had a copy and I was kind of looking through it and I read what it really seems like is a whole bunch of episodes, like a whole bunch of stories really. So, you can just kind of go to random ones and just read them and that's kind of what I did. So, that's just very specifically the thing that Twain is burlesqueing in this book.
Nate:
It is, yeah, it's one of the two pieces. The other piece being Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe", but it does take a while for the cycle to get to those two points and since the cycle is so big we realistically can't do like a whole history segment of how it progresses but if you do want a good general overview, like podcast style presentation of the King Arthur cycle we recommend you check out the excellent Great Courses series on King Arthur which somebody has posted to YouTube and we'll post a link in the episode description of that. It's really incredibly thorough. It's 24 I think different parts that are each about a half hour long covering different aspects of the cycle basically from the actual historical accounts of various battles that got morphed into the tall tales that focus on the Arthurian stuff all the way up to the present day of the novels that are people are still writing.
JM:
Yeah, like the media adaptations and stuff that are happening now or the Twain gets mentioned so do some modern movies and stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, but I have read a bit of the medieval stuff so before we get to Sir Walter and Sir Thomas I would just like to kind of go chronologically through the stuff that I've read just to give some brief recommendations if you're interested in that kind of thing.
So while there are clear historical predecessors the Arthur stuff really gets going with Geoffrey of Monmouth's "the History of the Kings of Britain", which was written around approximately 1136. Now I haven't read this one personally but apparently it's meant to be non-fiction like a Tacitus type thing but instead it's almost entirely historically inaccurate like in ridiculous ways that are just, like blatantly false, but nevertheless it was taken seriously as a historical document at the time so I think it would be at least worthwhile to give that a read because it just sounds very very strange. But the name and legend of King Arthur spread very far and wide to continental Europe and almost immediately a lot of verse and prose fiction is written in both French and German. So most important authors from the late 1100s is Chrétien de Troyes and I apologize for not pronouncing this correctly, the woman in the Great Courses series does, such sounds are very far beyond what my throat can produce, but I have read from him "Yvain, Knight of the Lion" which was written around 1180 and it's been several years since I've read it but I thought it was just absolutely fantastic. I read a verse translation and the format of a verse or prose translation is always an issue with these. Of course the ideal is side by side with the original to capture the magic as close as possible but that's also like a lot of effort but still I think this one might be worth doing that with as it was quite short and magic is indeed very much present in this one as I remember being very struck by the whole strangeness of the whole thing a very weird tale. It doesn't really factor into the hopper for the story tonight as far as the whole Arthurian lineage goes but I thought it was a really enjoyable reading experience.
As far as the other stuff which doesn't really directly factor into what we're doing tonight I've read two of the 13th century German verse works, namely "Parzival" written by Wolfram von Eschenbach and "Tristan" by Gottfried von Strassburg, both written in the 1210s.
So "Parzival" is the Grail Quest. It's very different from the one that we'll be getting with Sir Thomas Malory and a rather strange one as well. I read it several years ago which was a prose translation this time. It didn't really land 100% with me but I did generally like it and felt that it was very strange in places as well, though I remember thinking that a lot of it maybe went over my head, so something to revisit maybe. It has been several years, so I can't really say too much about it just because it's not quite fresh in my mind.
"Tristan" is something that is much more fresh in my mind as I just finished reading it yesterday. Von Strassburg died before he finished the poem and the Penguin edition I have, it also has the work "Tristan" by Thomas of Britain from the 1170s as an extended appendix. Now Thomas of Britain's work was what von Strassburg based his "Tristan" off of, and coincidentally the Thomas only survives in fragmentary form but what survives is the final sixth of the poem, what von Strassburg didn't get around to write in his lifetime, so if you combine the two you get the complete story. Now I haven't read through the Thomas yet; it's only like 50 pages so I'll probably get there sometime this week, maybe next week, but the von Strassburg is also in prose form in its translation which is something the translator really laments about, and even expresses difficulties in bringing it into modern German, which I thought was pretty interesting. Tristan and Isolde is a classic medieval tragedy and like "Parzival", doesn't really resemble what the story's form ends up being in Malory which represents roughly one third of the Malory text. The German one really likes to remind you that it's a tragedy; after all Tristan's name means "sorrow" and it seems that every chapter something sad happens it has all the characters present weeping with one another. It's also a lot more sexually explicit than Malory in ways that I really didn't expect. I don't want to spoil any plot elements but there is one subplot that really made me audibly gasp, just did not expect it to go there, but I enjoyed it I think more than the "Parzival" translation difficulties aside. Again, something maybe to revisit later down the road side by side with the medieval German and verse. One interesting thing about it is that it isn't explicitly Arthurian, but rather the story of Tristan and Isolde gets later attached to the King Arthur mythos by different, I believe French authors later on. Still it does resemble the Guinevere/Arthur/Lancelot love triangle quite a bit and while I didn't finish the Thomas, I did like both these German ones, they're probably more denser than everything else we'll mention tonight, and again due to the translation issues maybe a little difficult to penetrate.
So the other one that I've read which doesn't directly factor into the Malory, as much as I like Mark Twain, I have to say that it's by far my favorite story that we're going to be mentioning tonight and that is, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" written sometime in the late 14th century in Middle English, and talk about magic the language of this is absolutely incredible. It's Middle English is perfectly readable to the modern English reader with a bit of effort and there's an absolutely fantastic translation into modern English by Tolkien of which Terry Jones of Monty Python fame does a really great reading of, I think I mentioned it before in the podcast and it's so yeah worth mentioning again and when you listen to a reading of it it just really comes across at how much of these stories were meant to be heard orally, you know they're not being read by people like us who were squirreled away in a room or whatever with a book, they are people hearing it told out loud through somebody whose job it is to perform these stories and it really comes across when you can hear a verse translation of it that kind of resembles the original verse. I mean it doesn't take much to get from the Middle English to Tolkien's modern English which is something that I think is lost going from medieval German to modern English so I think it makes it easier to enjoy
JM:
Yeah, I would imagine so.
Nate:
But yeah it just really transports you into another world, and I just can't recommend that enough.
JM:
Yeah, I have actually read that one. I always forget that that's actually part of this cycle. yeah it is and Sir Gawain does get mentioned a lot and yeah that's a pretty amazing story, or poem really that I'd like to reread at some point
Nate:
Yeah like I said the Terry Jones reading is just fantastic and the Middle English really isn't as hard as you might think it is, certainly there's different words that aren't used anymore and the spellings are archaic but once you kind of get into the swing of things it's really not that bad.
So getting into the stuff that directly influenced Malory there was a huge set of stories referred to as the Vulgate cycle written in French by a series of authors in the 1210s that encompasses the giant tale of Lancelot and the last of these I also just read which was published as "The Death of King Arthur" by Penguin which is the prime source of material that Malory used for this final segment of his work. This one in the French Vulgate covers the Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur love triangle and betrayal, and the events leading directly to Arthur's death which are also present in the novel we're reading tonight, but comparing it directly with a Malory there's just so much more of a human element in the French than how Malory portrays it. The action feels tense there's good plotting and even though the vocabulary is basic in a way that Malory is I think it's a bit more effective in making these like actual people. There's a really charming stylistic bit where it ends chapters and opens chapters by saying things like "and now the story stops. The story of Lancelot", and opens the next chapter saying "and now the story relates to King Arthur", or whatever as a way of switching points of view.
Based on plot summaries I've read it does sound like the most interesting part of the French Vulgate cycle, from what it seems the various parts of the cycle the grail quest Lancelot's rise to fame early King Arthur stuff with Merlin all seem to be written by different authors, so I think the consensus is that this is the only piece of the Vulgate cycle written by this one author. And again all the authors are unknown, but I really enjoyed this one I'd recommend giving it a go if you want something more along the lines with the, I guess, "classic" interpretation of King Arthur stuff as I think I like this one a little more than the two German verse ones, but still I think all enjoyable.
But this one brings us to Malory, which I have a little more trouble recommending him in strong terms. So Malory was imprisoned and possibly wrote "Le Morte D'Arthur" while incarcerated but possibly not, sources aren't particularly clear on this point and conflict, but regardless, he set out to compile all the existing King Arthur stories into one volume and as such one continuous narrative from Arthur's birth, his ascent to power, Merlin, him building the round table, the adventures of all of his knights, which include the tale of Tristan and Isolde, the Grail Quest, the Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur love triangle, and then the death of Arthur. It's basically an Arthurian compendium, written in Middle English. However, it's 15th century Middle English, which is almost modern English. Pretty much all modern printings are just more or less modernized spellings, rather than translations, and you can easily read it in the original Middle English if you wanted to, and we'll post a link to the text, because I think it's a little bit more fun that way.
Despite the fact that this becomes the definitive King Arthur version for several centuries to follow, I think it's also the one I like the least out of everything mentioned so far. And Twain definitely pokes at it quite a bit. He rips at it pretty hard.
JM:
And yeah, he did seem to like it.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, so there's definitely reasons why he might not like certain parts of it and why certain parts are better than others, I think. It's just because Malory is pulling from such a wide variety of authors who all have their original own agendas and are all in radically different tones. The woman who did the Great Courses series on Arthur really talks about the piety of the Grail Quest, which is both present in the French Vulgate and in Malory. But different parts of it, like the end, just don't have that element of religiosity just kind of beating you over the head with it. So I mean, it is really varied as far as the tone and the quality of the work. But there is a bit in the work we're reading tonight where our hero and his companion, Sandy, are riding along. And Sandy is relating a tale which she's quoting directly from Malory to our hero. And our hero responds, presumably voicing Twain's complaints about Malory.
And he says, "The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little too simple; the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random—random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land! a body ought to discriminate—they come together with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horsetail, and brake his neck, and then there's another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to figure up results, you can't tell one fight from another, nor who whipped; and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it's pale and noiseless— just ghosts scuffling in a fog. Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle?—the burning of Rome in Nero’s time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, ‘Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!’ Why, that ain’t a picture!”
JM:
Oh, Twain the critic! Might as well close the book on Malory now! Wow. Yeah.
Nate:
But you know, I do have to agree that these criticisms are directly on the 'mark', if we can permit such a pun. And at times, Malory really does read like the Symzonia chapter title summary version of these original tales. I mean, he's pulling from a wide variety of largely French authors, and since the original authors vary a lot in intent, so does Malory. He tries to have it all be continuous, but it does really feel patchwork and episodic, especially if you try to read it all the way through, which is what I did, and probably not the ideal way to do it as it's huge, maybe around 350,000 words altogether.
I did a bit of a side-by-side compare with the "Death of Arthur" from the French Vulgate, and the French Vulgate just emotionally pulls off seeing so much better, even the ridiculous one. So when Arthur has received his death blow, his skull has been cleaved open, and he survives for several days, and in his grief, hugs his butler with such grievous force that he crushes him to death. Now, it's pretty absurd, as in the French Vulgate, Arthur is supposed to be 92, but the author of the French Vulgate really conveys how deeply upset Arthur is by this, him accidentally killing his butler. And he's just completely distraught and upset for several pages, whereas when it happens in the Malory, he just kind of shrugs it off, like he's giving us a plot summary or something.
So Malory is probably my least favorite of the medieval works, and Twain is going to be quoting from him quite a bit. And I think the plot beats of "Connecticut Yankee" more or less follow the arc of Malory. However, possibly more relevant to the themes of night errantry and chivalry that Mark Twain was trying to address with "Connecticut Yankee" is "Ivanhoe" by Sir Walter Scott from 1819. Now, it's not directly Arthurian as it tries to ground knight errantry in actual history, as after all, the King Arthur mythos has virtually no basis in fact, and it's quite anachronistic in a lot of ways, taking place in the sixth century where that whole knight errantry culture didn't exist, like castles weren't in Britain at the time. And there's just a lot of pseudo history there.
But Ivanhoe takes place in 1194, after Richard Cœur de Lion is released from prison, and covertly retakes his throne in Britain. And it's of course, no more historically accurate than Arthur is, but I think what is laudable about it, and what makes it so influential for the development of the modern fantasy genre, is that it creates a historical fantasy world that is logically consistent with all of its parts. And while the consensus is that it's not historically accurate to base the social conflicts of the late 12th century between the Normans, the oppressive colonizers, and the Saxons, the downtrodden oppressed, especially as the Battle of Hastings at this point was more than a hundred years past, it does sound "correct", in that it's extremely plausible for someone who knows nothing about that era of English history to believe it. And Scott is really good at transporting us into this fantasy world where that's indeed what happened, and it might lend it more of an air of authenticity than something like King Arthur tales that just sound ridiculous on their face.
Scott is largely credited with inventing the modern historical novel with his earlier Waverly novels that are set in Scotland, but the world of medieval knight errantry I think resonates more with a non-British audience, in particular the modern fantasy reader. And the novel isn't perfect: probably the biggest issue for the modern reader will be the anti-Semitism, which isn't to say that the novel or Scott was being anti-Semitic. In fact, I think rather quite the opposite that Scott is trying to be progressive by portraying two sympathetic Jewish main characters. Rebecca is possibly the most intelligent and wise of all the characters in the novel, but they both get a lot of anti-Semitic abuse through the course of the novel, and it's perhaps a bit much overdone at times. So I mean, it's not like Dickens' "Oliver Twist" or a few works we've read on the podcast, like "The Diamond Lens" or "The Air Battle" where the Jewish characters are just like, grossly anti-Semitic caricatures. But I think that...
JM:
They're more sympathetic.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, they're definitely sympathetic characters and they're characters we want to root for. But I think that progressive sentiment from 1819 doesn't always age perfectly in 2023. So perhaps approach this one with a slight yellow flag, keeping that in mind. But it's extremely easy to draw a pretty direct line from this to Tolkien and "Lord of the Rings", as there's a lot of discussion about culture, about history, about language. And plus Scott is witty, he's clever, he's funny, and he has a real talent for descriptive prose and pacing that as much more modern feeling than any of the predecessors we've mentioned so far. But it's still easy to see why Mark Twain thought this was a whole bunch of bullshit. And in fact, he really hated Sir Walter Scott.
JM:
I don't know that he found Walter Scott charming like he found "Le Morte d'Arthur".
Nate:
No, no, he certainly didn't.
JM:
In fact, it seems like he actually wanted to blame the Civil War on Walter Scott, although I'm sure he was partially joking. But why don't we get that a little bit later?
Nate:
Okay, so while "Ivanhoe" doesn't directly tie into the Arthur myth, and tonight's novel certainly doesn't drive its plotlines from it, I think it's worth a while to keep in mind that "Connecticut Yankee" is going to be just as much of a response to "Ivanhoe" as it is to Malory. Perhaps more so as Scott was really more directly relevant to Mark Twain's world than Malory was.
JM:
So you're a lot more read on this stuff than I am. Definitely. And I really enjoyed hearing about all that. I'm definitely going to have to, I've actually listened to a lot of those Great Courses, recordings, and I've, yeah, it's been really interesting getting a little bit more into this. There's been a lot of potential background for this episode. Yeah, and quite something. But I was going to mention the movie "Excalibur", because that's really cool too.
Gretchen:
Yeah,
Nate:
Something from, yeah, there's so much King Arthur media and movies from the straight adaptations to the lampooning. I think we've all seen "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", right?
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, of course.
Nate:
And even stuff like "Army of Darkness", which doesn't directly tie into it, it still takes a lot of the themes and the basic ideas. So, I mean, it really is very far reaching in today's society still for something that has, at this point, really over a thousand years worth of stories behind it.
JM:
Yeah. And our book, our book tonight does have adaptations of which I have watched one, which I will talk about very briefly later. No, it's not worth watching, but there might be one out there somewhere that is. And yeah, so on that note, "Connecticut Yankee". So we mentioned that he already received a copy of the Malory book, and supposedly, he was thinking about just sort of incorporating it into one of his humorous sketches, and that's the basic idea that he had. He started writing notes for it, and he said, "dream of being a knight errant in armor. Use iron sleeve." And talking about how hot it is and how uncomfortable it is. And it sounds like that's kind of how the idea almost germinated. But he obviously had things to say about contemporary issues and things as well, which I think is there's so many, there's so many different sides of this book, and he's able to incorporate it in a really fun way. That's really interesting. But let's take a short break, and then we'll talk about our feelings about the book.
non-spoiler discussion
(Music: Low synth chords)
JM:
This book goes back so long for me. It's hard for me to think in this, in the usual way that we think about the podcast, even thinking about this book. Because even though I actually haven't read a lot of the source material which influenced this book, well, maybe, I mean, I don't know that Twain really read that much of it himself. I can't really picture him, I don't think there was that much study of like that kind of thing when he was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri.
Nate:
No, and I think it really all filters through the Mallory. And for centuries, Mallory was like the definitive King Arthur version of the legend, and it kind of comes back in with Walter Scott reintroducing the idea of historical romances, and then Tennyson did his "The Idylls of the King", which really brought King Arthur specifically back in popularity. But yeah, for a really long time, most people were reading just the Mallory in English. And I think that it wasn't until the mid 20th century where a lot of the stuff that I was just talking about, you know, the German poems and the French Vulgate and stuff was translated fully into English for the first time.
JM:
Yeah, about that. So nowadays, right, I mean, people write about a lot of stuff. And I don't know, you can say like, in a way, nothing's sacred, right? Like, I mean, some people get offended if you take down, they can try to take down their favorite thing or whatever. But it's like, it's not a big deal. At the end of the day, most people, although there's a cynical side of me that says, oh, Star Wars fans or something, most people just get on with their lives and they're okay with it. But apparently, Twain taking down Malory was like a huge deal in the British press. And they hated it so much. And it was like, in the Pall Mall Gazette, I have a quote here, in the Pall Mall Gazette, it says, he might as well have done a burlesque of the Sermon on the Mount. It's like, he's basically lampooning the Bible almost. It says, that's how seriously they take it. And you can't do that, of course.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm sure the same people would have gotten upset about "Life of Brian", you know, 100 years later.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, still, that was like 100 years later. I don't know, it was a time and also the, I guess there was definitely a lot of politics involved in this book. And we'll try and navigate it as best we can. I'm sure we'll be missing some things, but just the fact that he was obviously trying to take some people down and having fun with it, I don't think he's generally mean-spirited, I think he thinks that he's making everybody stronger, right? So he's kind of like your wise uncle at this point, with the cigar in his mouth telling you, this is how you want to live your life. You want to have your republic. You want to have your democracy. And yet there's a certain cockiness about it that is very satirical. And I think it's just so, it's so ingenious and it's so fun because every time you like get too far into thinking, oh, this is a really silly book. This is kind of absurd. Okay, this is, and then suddenly he throws this like pathos at you and you're suddenly taken aback and you're like, oh, he's writing about real stuff here. Like even though he's doing this satirical, lampooning, funny book, P-H-U-N-N-Y, as he actually wrote, he said, he didn't want to be known as one of the "phunny phellows". Apparently this was a thing at the time. And by this point, it was really starting to rankle with Mark Twain that people wanted to hear the silly jumping frog story. He didn't really necessarily want to be known as that funny guy anymore. So I think this is kind of, you can't entirely get away from it. But then something I noticed in the adaptations, they really play up the comedy and play down the pathos, which is probably, I don't know, maybe nowadays they would do it differently, but like apparently, I don't know, you said "Bad Knight", which I think is the latest one, that's like more of a teenage kind of, I don't know, it's the latest adaptation in film of this story.
Nate:
Yeah, "Black Knight", with Martin Lawrence was well like 2004 or something like that. Yeah. It's not necessarily an adaptation of this, it's just kind of the basic loose idea.
JM:
Right, it doesn't use the name. Unlike some of the other very loose adaptations, so whatever. But we'll talk more about those.
Nate:
There was also another popular one, "A Kid in King Arthur's Court", from about 10 years prior, like '94, '95 or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, there was that, and there was an earlier Disney one called "Unidentified Flying Oddball", or "Spaceman in King Arthur's Court", in which he was an astronaut from a future with an android. 'Cause it was 1979; they had to include robots in everything.
Nate:
Right, right.
JM:
They did "The Black Hole" that year too. But anyway, we can talk more about that later on. So Gretchen, what do you think as a first time reader of this book, how did you feel about it? And basically maybe not having come back to Twain for a long time.
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, it's funny that it is like, the comedy is very good in this book. And I can see why that would be exaggerated in some of the adaptations because there were quite a lot of times, I read a lot of this between classes in my campus library. And I remember a couple of times like having to stifle like laughing too hard cause I didn't want to be too disruptive. There were definitely times when that happened.
JM:
And there are a lot of funny bits.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and it's in the way that it's written to the point where there's a lot of times you'll see in my summary where I just kind of used the same quotes from Twain 'cause it's just really well phrased. And I just wanted to read what Twain himself wrote, what Hank writes in his narrative. But yeah, there is also that pathos, though. And of course you get that as the book progresses, you get more of a sense of the seriousness of what Twain is writing about and kind of the departure from just this being pure comedy.
Nate:
Yeah, I think this is one of those works where a simple plot summary doesn't really do justice to the humor of the scenes. It's really in Twain's writing and his prose style.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
He's just a master at putting these phrases together. Possibly more so than any other author we've come to on the podcast so far.
JM:
Maybe so, and definitely I think speaks to that oral tradition that you were referring to earlier. I think this guy, Mark Twain, his stories were definitely meant to be told. And the fact that it was this new American vernacular is actually what made him so popular in England, for example. 'Cause they wanted that, they wanted to hear more of that. What that vernacular, how the new American way of doing things and the new American letters and literature and like all this burgeoning center of manufacturing and industry and everything that's happening. And Hank Morgan is right at the center of that, our main character in the book. And he's the kind of character that you would see in like a Robert Heinlein story too, who's like basically capable of doing or building anything he wants, you know, he just has to put his mind to it and he can accomplish it. Anything physical anyway.
Nate:
He does feel very much like an archetypal science fiction character.
JM:
Yeah, the great engineer, basically. And that was definitely the thing that caught me when I was young, reading this book. That was definitely the thing. Sir Boss, Hank Morgan the Yankee was a hero. I thought he was awesome. And I couldn't wait to see him take those knights down. And I think Mark Twain was really good with making this book work on so many different levels because every time I read this, it still feels good and fresh. And it's not, it's not that anymore. You know, I don't really, Sir Boss is sort of cocky. And sometimes, I mean, he always tries to do the right thing, but just hearing his voice, hearing him justify it and stuff like that, it's like, you like him, but you're also kind of like, yeah, you're just running roughshod over everything, aren't you? Like, I don't know, there's enough sarcasm and kind of like poking fun at this new mindset of wanting to build roads over everything and bring in all this new technology is like, there's a little bit of a cynical side to it coming out. And I think that from what I've read, a lot of the reviews at the time missed that and they just celebrate the fact that it's pro-democracy and pro-American, pro-technological innovation all the way pro-industry. And like the movie adaptations definitely do. I think it's so interesting that you perceive that focus now, you can't help but notice a lot of things that maybe, I don't know, it's, it didn't come out to everybody at the time.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I agree that it's, we were talking about how upset people were at him poking fun at Malory. And there are definitely times when reading the Malory that is inserted into the novel, I was sometimes, I was waiting to get back to Twain's voice 'cause it's so alive and vibrant sometimes compared to Malory. But I think you do get that he is kind of poking fun at Sir Boss and his mindset as well. He approaches everything with such a business-like attitude, and it sort of can cloud his judgment sometimes, and he does get into trouble with some of the ways he approaches things at times.
Nate:
Twain satirizes everybody. And I guess what makes him a great writer for this kind of format is he doesn't, he doesn't hold back and he's not trying to push any particular agenda. He's definitely willing to take some stuff down but I think that he has no trouble poking at everything when he's doing it and it's a really nice touch that he has.
JM:
So I think like, and this is so really fascinating because I mean, everything is all looking at how this book is about the past. Whereas I think it's, to me, I just see more and more how it's the future. And then like that stuff is fun, that all the knights and stuff is great. It's awesome, like I love the setting and the way he's poking fun at that is great too, but I think that some of the like, not only is he making fun of, I guess, Sir Boss's "can do" spirit and everything like that, but we have our illustrations, which I didn't find out about till much, much later and how they in plenitude reflect on the text but also enhance it.
Nate:
Yeah, I was trying to find a detailed list of every illustration and its references because there's like 225 or something like that, illustrations throughout the novel and all the versions of it that I've read before, or seen in person, don't have the illustrations. So I had a mass-market paperback, which didn't have them, and the huge anthology I mentioned earlier doesn't have them. We read the recent Barnes and Noble edition, which has, I believe, most of them, but not all of them, but it has a really good introduction and a really thorough set of notes. So we can recommend that as like a general reference copy, but if you want a real readable copy to experience the, I guess, full Connecticut Yankee, we'll post a link in the description to the original 1889 printing, which has the illustrations as they were meant to be seen with the text directly ingrained with the text. And there's even some visual gags with the formatting of certain words and paragraphs and things like that, which just don't come across in any of the subsequent paperback editions.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we were reading this version. I actually also decided to take out a version that was at the campus library and it's the Norton Critical Edition, that also like ingrains the illustrations right within the text. And I don't, I'm not too certain if all of the illustrations are in it, but it has quite a lot of the ones that were in the Barnes and Noble version.
Nate:
Yeah, if it's directly formatted with the text, I'd imagine they'd all be in there because they're probably using the plates that were, or at least a facsimile of the 1889 printing. It has like the elaborate letters that start off the chapter with that kind of fade into the sun or whatever is going on. It's a really well illustrated book and the cartoonist illustrator does not hold back with a political satire. There's a lot of contemporary political figures who again, I didn't recognize and that's why a fully annotated version with a list of all the illustrations and what it's referencing would be helpful, but it makes fun of Queen Victoria, it makes fun of Jay Gould, it makes fun of a whole bunch of other contemporary political figures.
JM:
Prince of Wales is in there apparently. Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, apparently is Clarence. What else? There's a few others that I found anyway, that were mentioned, but I don't know, I guess it could be up for debate. Like, I don't know that he ever really explained all this and I think that Twain in a way, I mean, he definitely endorsed the illustrations. Like he said, what did he say? He said, he got everything that was in the book and more. So he did say like maybe it was going a little further than he intended, but at the same time, that seems to have been Mark Twain's thing at this point was he was careful not to, he was kind of avoiding the controversy a little bit. So he might have maybe like steered away from saying certain things or whatever deliberately and out in the open, but he was still seemingly glad they were there and he was very happy with Daniel Beard's illustrations for the book.
American reviewers liked it far more than English ones. There's some pretty vehement negative English press and I think it seems like that's what he was hoping for in a way, which is, it's really funny because I mean, I really do think it's kind of telling how stuck in the past the people were who must have responded negatively to it. Whereas the Americans are just like, oh yeah, gee, that's great, man. Like they didn't really seem to, I don't know. It's really interesting. And I can just picture him rubbing his hands together with glee the whole time and chuckling. Yeah, this is great, isn't it? And none of the reviews mentioned the apocalyptic climax and the tragedy brought on by pollution and industrial military death.
Nate:
Yeah, which is crazy because I mean that like, that's what makes the work.
JM:
Exactly, exactly. And it's like, I don't know. It's like, they didn't even know. They didn't even know. Did they read it all? Sometimes I don't finish a book to the end and I might just don't want to say something about it.
But also worth noting is that Mark Twain wrote a lot of his books in episodes as well. Like he definitely did not sit down and say, "I'm gonna write a book!", and just finish a book. Like that was just not something he did. He would regularly take pieces from other books that he had thing or other things that he had written, other books that he had written and put them into the other book so that he could fill the space, right? And I think that people a lot of the time thought of him as the sketch man. So they're just like, oh, here's Mark Twain being funny. And it's easy, I guess, to disassociate yourself when you're like in that state of mind. But I think the guy who wrote "Huckleberry Finn" by this point is perfectly capable of including enough pathos to convince us that he's not a "mere humorist". So, yeah.
Yeah, it's really interesting also how Hank spends so much time lecturing, right? And he's always telling everybody how they're a product of their training. Well, he's telling us how everybody is. And he doesn't seem to notice that in himself, although he knows it in everyone else. Everyone else is just an animal, primitive.
I love this book, as might be obvious by now. I definitely, definitely recommend it. It's a really easy read. It's definitely like when my dad was reading it to me, when I was really, really young, the language was a little bit difficult, especially Sandy's rambling monologues.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But it's fun to get through it. And all the while you're reading that, you also get Mark Twain, Hank Morgan's running commentary on the story and how shittily it's going. So, yeah. Yeah, I don't know what you want to get into specifics, guys?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
All right. All right.
spoiler plot summary
(Music: Highly percussive, "obnoxious" electronic version of "The Sweet Bye and Bye" with screaming rave synths and distorted 909 kicks)
Gretchen:
So, Twain's novel begins with a section in which a narrator by the initials, M.T., meets a stranger while visiting the English fortress, Warwick Castle, and strikes up a conversation with him about the sixth century, the time of King Arthur. While viewing the armor of one knight, Sir Sagramore, which has what appears to be a bullet hole through the chainmail, the stranger claims to not only have seen Sagramore shot, but that he had done so himself, then leaves before the narrator can question him further. M.T. reads from Thomas Malory's book on King Arthur later that evening with Twain here using a passage straight from Malory, something, of course, he will do, at multiple points throughout the novel.
JM:
Yeah, it's a whole, it's very helpful that he includes that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And you really do get a sense of how Malory reads from Twain's excerpts.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and it is a great, again, like a really interesting contrast to have Malory and Twain's voices intermixed. I agree. After reading, the narrator hears someone at the door. It is the stranger from Warwick Castle, a man named Hank Morgan, who begins to tell his story after having a few drinks. He says he is American, from Hartford, Connecticut, and a practical man, barren of sentiment or poetry, as he says. As he grew older, Hank took on a career at an arms factory, and he learned to make things from guns to boilers to engines.
JM:
By the way, it's not true. He's full of sentiment.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Just thought I'd point that out. Sorry.
Gretchen:
He had worked his way to the position of head superintendent at the factory when he got knocked out in a fight with one of the men under him. He woke to find himself amid a country landscape with a man in armor riding a horse and wielding a sword and shield addressing him. Hank responded with confusion and told the knight to get along back to your circus, which aggravates him. After getting chased up a tree by the other man, the American agreed to go where the knight led him, expecting still the location to be some circus or asylum. However, the man led him to a fortress, a place the knight said is Camelot. Here, Hank stops in his story to M.T. as he gets tired, but gives the other man a manuscript that contains the rest of his tale. It is this manuscript that makes up most of the rest of the book.
While approaching Camelot, which Hank assumes is an asylum, he and the knight run across a girl who reacts with shock towards the former rather than the latter, further confusing Hank. He finds men and women of a town they pass through also respond to him in the same way. After arriving at the castle, Hank manages to ask an old man there if he belongs to the asylum or is visiting, and when the man begins to speak in sixth century dialect responds, "that will do, I reckon you are a patient".
He then comes across a young boy that Hank decides to call Clarence, who strikes up a conversation with Hank, shocking him when he tells the American that he was born in the year 513. The current date Hank finds out is June 19th, 528, which he just so happens to know is a few days off from the only total eclipse that happened in the first half of the sixth century. He decides that if he observes that event, he'll know for sure he has been transported to the past. He also learns from Clarence that the knight who brought him to the castle is Sir Kay and that Hank is his prisoner, that he will be thrown into the dungeon after he is exhibited to King Arthur and the Knights of the Table round. He's brought to the hall where they are gathered, drinking and talking. Hank finds them a child-like and innocent lot, telling and listening to lies with naivete. Along with Hank are other prisoners. Many are bloodied, suffering from thirst and hunger along with their wounds, but they don't make a sound. But Hank claims not from any effort of will, but from what he calls mere animal training, having never been treated any better throughout their lives and not expecting to be. All of the Knights of the Table share stories of their exploits, very likely exaggerating them and bragging about their accomplishments, including Sir Kay, when an old man rises from the table to the dismay of the others. It is Merlin, Clarence tells Hank, calling him a liar and magician, prepared to retell a story only tolerated because his power is feared. The story, also taken from Malory, is of Merlin taking Arthur to receive his sword from the Lady of the Lake, and it puts everyone at the table to sleep. They're roused, however, by the jokes of a Sir Dinadan, the humorist, and Sir Kay takes up the conversation, bringing forth Hank as a barbarian from a land where people wear similar strange clothing, Hank still, of course, being in his 18th century attire, clothing that was enchanted, but that Kay was able to disenchant through prayer. He condemns Hank to burn at the stake at noon on the 21st. Stripped of his clothes, so there is no chance of enchantment, he is taken to the dungeon.
He falls asleep in the dungeon and wakes believing at first it might just have been a dream, until he sees Clarence come to see him. He asks the boy to help him escape, but Clarence says it's impossible. Not only are there guards, but Merlin has put a spell on the dungeon that prevents anyone from helping him. Hank laughs at this, then is struck with an idea. He tells Clarence he himself is a magician, has known Merlin over several lifetimes, and that Merlin isn't really a good magician at all. He asks Clarence to go to King Arthur and tell him Hank will arrange a calamity if his execution is still going to be carried out.
JM:
And isn't he so lucky there's a calamity to hand?
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, really convenient that there's that eclipse that he also happens to know what's going to happen.
JM:
Yeah, it's like, it's kind of a very memorable, awesome effect, but then you're like, but how could he possibly remember that or know that?
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, he does know quite a lot, you know? He's someone just full of knowledge.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, he's that good, yeah. He's basically that, the typical science fiction hero.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
When Clarence leaves to do so, he begins to wonder what he could do to prove his words and remembers the eclipse. When Clarence returns, he tells Hank that the king was ready to free him. When Merlin questioned Hank's claims and caused doubt in Arthur, Hank then gathers from Clarence that it is the morning of the 20th. So he claims that tomorrow, as he is about to be burned alive, he will blot out the sun and cast the world into darkness. Sometime later, the same day, however, he is taken from the dungeon to the stake. The date of his execution moved up. He finds out that it was Clarence's doing. The boy, believing truly in Hank's power, thought it would be better to strike sooner. So, Hank is brought to the stake expecting to die.
Then, everyone-
JM:
He takes it one step further.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Then, everyone stares towards the sky and the American does as well to see that the eclipse is starting. He yells out that if anyone moves, he'll blast them with thunder. King Arthur pleads with Hank to spare the sun, offering anything in return. Not knowing how long the eclipse will last, he asks time to consider the offer, stalling for more time. He also grows concerned for he's still not sure if this is the real eclipse he knew about, asking the monk who was going to burn the stake, he is told that the date is truly the 21st, and realizes that Clarence had been mistaken.
JM:
Lucky.
Gretchen:
Yeah, very lucky.
JM:
On so many counts.
Gretchen:
As the eclipse continues, he names his terms. He wants to be a perpetual minister and executive of Arthur. And for his services, "1% of such actual increase of revenue over and above its present amount as he may succeed in creating for the state", Hank's own words. The king agrees, but then Hank makes one more demand, requesting clothes as a way to stall a bit more. After he is dressed and the eclipse is total, Hank lifts his hands and banishes the darkness. As the sun appears once more, the people are full of gratitude.
As Hank settles into his role as second personage of the kingdom, he finds himself homesick, wishing for the luxuries of the 19th century. He has to make do with no soap, no matches or candles, no gas, no sugar or tea or tobacco, and many other comforts of his time.
JM:
This reminds me of "Once and Future King", where Merlin, in the first part, is complaining about those things and about not having access to those things anymore. Because in "Once and Future King", Merlin lives backwards through time. And so everything he's experienced later has happened. And I'm kind of thinking, yeah, maybe there was a bit of Mark Twain influence there, even.
Gretchen:
Yeah, too bad that's not the Merlin in this one. They could console each other.
Nate:
Yeah, it's kind of interesting how Merlin's role like changes from story to story.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, in Malory, he like dies right off and like gets buried in a cave or something and then. But I like the Mark Twain Merlin a lot. Yeah, yes.
Gretchen:
Definitely, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, Merlin is a fascinating character. And I think the fact that when I first heard about him, he was pretty much portrayed as a fraud and a charlatan is sort of funny.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I feel like he is a character that lends himself to a lot of retellings, like a very fluid personage.
JM:
Oh yeah. People can sort of criticize the different interpretations of classic characters, right? I mean, like, there's been a lot of King Arthurs over the years too, and people have something to say about that. I was having an argument about "Excalibur" the other day after we watched it, it was like, "King Arthur is not supposed to be a dupe!" Well, maybe, I don't know, maybe a bit. I mean, he's oblivious, I guess. So that's kind of reflected here as well. I mean, it's reflected in a lot of the versions of the story, I guess, even though he's noble, and knightly, and proud, and mighty, and all that. So, I don't know, some people don't like their favorite things being lampoon, which is a theme of Mark Twain already. So, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes, well, due to the lack of luxury, Hank compares himself to Robinson Crusoe, and decides he must invent, contrive, create, and reorganize things, as he did.
JM:
Yeah, become The Boss.
Gretchen:
Yes, become The Boss. The people of Arthur's kingdom take great interest in him, wanting to see the person responsible for restoring the sun to them. They also, to the concern of Hank, want to see him perform another miracle. He knows, he writes in his manuscript, of an eclipse of the moon, but it is two years off, and he laments, "I would have given a good deal for license to hurry it up, and use it now when there was a big market for it. It seemed a great pity to have it wasted so, and come lagging along at a time when a body wouldn't have any use for it as like is not. If it had been booked for only a month away, I could have sold it short." And this was one of the parts that had me laughing quite a bit on campus.
But as Merlin is also beginning to spread rumors of Hank's fraud, he knows he has to come up with something soon, and he does. He throws Merlin in the dungeon, then claims in a fortnight he will destroy Merlin's tower with fires from heaven. He and Clarence then make preparations to blow up the castle, making blasting powder and a lightning rod. On the day he decides to commit his demolition, he releases Merlin from the dungeon and brings him to witness it. He allows Merlin to attempt any enchantments he thinks will protect the tower from the destruction, and the magician does try one. It, of course, doesn't work. The tower is blown to smithereens by the explosives Hank had placed inside it. Merlin's stock, he says, was flat after that, and Hank advises the king to let him handle small matters like the weather and rebuilds his tower for him.
After this miracle, he has more authority among the people than before, and his power is equal to that of the king, claiming he was the substance while the king was the shadow. However, the church remains more powerful than either. Although many people in the kingdom are slaves in name, Hank considers other men to be slaves as well, bowing before the church in aristocracy and getting nothing in return from these higher authorities. Hank realizes how important titles are in this place and period he's found himself in, and realizes that while he is admired without a title, he is not respected. He does eventually come by a title, one that spreads and becomes how he is addressed thereafter, The Boss.
Also, something Sir Boss witnesses in Camelot are the tournaments between knights, which he isn't too impressed by, nor does he have any interest in performing in one, despite Lancelot and the other knights' attempts to get him to join one. He does have one priest, priests being among the few who can read and write in the kingdom, observe the tournaments and report on them in the Boss's hopes of eventually starting up a newspaper, something he thinks new countries should have alongside a patent office and school system. He includes the report, another section from Malory, which focuses on the triumphs of the knight Sir Gareth. While watching Gareth, who he affectionately thinks of as Gary, in a match, Sir Boss is next to Dinadan telling a tired joke he has heard too many times before, and sees Gareth hit a man who was laughing at it. He says that he hopes the man is killed just as Gareth hits Sir Sagramore, who thinks the Boss is talking about him. Sir Sagramore challenges Sir Boss, but sets their confrontation a few years into the future. He is going in search of the Holy Grail and won't be back for some time. Although King Arthur proposes that Sir Boss should go out in search of the Grail himself, he gets out of doing so, focused on getting other things in the kingdom up and running. So far, he has started up factories and different schools for training, kept under wraps for fear of the church's interference. He starts up Sunday schools where freedom of religion is practiced and a unified church is discouraged.
As four years pass, his projects grow, but still proceeds with caution. He establishes a military academy as well, which is the one he keeps most hidden. He also establishes telegraph and telephone wires for private use only using ground wires instead of putting up poles. Clarence remains his right-hand man and is training in journalism, something he seems quite skillful in.
But soon King Arthur is reminding him of his need to go questing in preparation for Sir Sagramore's return.
JM:
Yeah, all the stuff he's doing. And they're just, remember, several years from now, you're gonna have to do this. Don't forget. That's holy duty.
Gretchen:
Don't forget. Yeah, mark it on your calendar, you know, four years from now. The opportunity arises when a young woman comes to the king with a tale about being held captive in a castle with over 40 other women by three giants with four arms and one eye in the middle of their foreheads. After hearing her story, Arthur gives the quest to Sir Boss, much to his dismay. He decides to question the woman himself. Demoiselle Alissande la Carteloise, I think that's how I, I've never said that out loud before, so I hope I got that right.
JM:
Yeah, I think that's pretty good.
Gretchen:
Okay. Who he nicknames Sandy, doesn't have any proof of her story, not that she sees why that's necessary, nor can she tell him directly where the castle is. He vents his frustration over this to Clarence, who is just as confused as Sandy was about his questions, as it is expected of her to ride with the Boss and show him the way. He finds the idea of doing so scandalous, thinking of his engagement to a woman in his own time in Connecticut. But he then wonders if he'll ever see her again and decides to take on the journey with Sandy.
The day of the start of his quest, he is delayed as he struggles with his armor, eventually getting the knights to help him with the process. Only after he has assembled his suit does he realize that there are more convenient outfits for longer journeys, but has no time to change it.
JM:
A really big deal is made of all this. This is like, this is a lot of time is spent on this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He really wants to de-romanticize this knights in armor business.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there are several paragraphs of describing the amount of armor that he has to put on and the struggle to do so.
JM:
And how uncomfortable it is. And how he has to pick his nose.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He leaves with Sandy, everyone gathers to say goodbye as they head off.
Nate:
So I guess off our pair go. It is kind of an inverse "Don Quixote" scenario where the knight now knows what he's doing, but he's traveling with this, this ridiculous person who sees a lot of strange things in every mundane instance. So after a drink and a makeshift smoke of some dried willow bark, Sandy is relatively helpful as far as suiting the armor and all that stuff goes, but she's quite chatty, perhaps excessively so, much to Hank's annoyance.
JM:
Well, she's an endless supply. A lot is made of that too.
Nate:
Yeah, considering a lot of it is directly from Malory, so it might not be the most riveting subject of conversation. But they have nothing to eat and a storm comes in and Hank gets wet, insects crawl inside his armor, which causes him to not get any sleep. Sandy, however, is quite refreshed and they're on their way again in the morning and they encounter some freemen working on the road.
JM:
For free.
Nate:
Yeah. Sandy thinks it would be quite uncouth to eat with them, but Hank is rather struck by their situation. Freemen, but they're unable to leave without permission from their bishop. It's typical of medieval feudalism, the church exploiting the labor from such men and pocketing all the wealth for themselves. "The French Revolution had swept this all away in a reign of terror, but what of the slow reign of terror that allowed these conditions to exist for 1500 years?" He tells the freemen about democracy and what would they think of such a system? And this just puzzles them as such an idea had never occurred to them before. Hank realizes that he can exploit the situation and incite some kind of revolution, but he realizes he can't do it too hastily. So he tells one of the freemen to join him in his man factory and he'll teach him how to read there. Hank pays three pennies for his breakfast, which is like an incredible amountb and goes to smoke his pipe with the flint and steel they have, which scare the freemen off running, thinking he's some kind of fire-breathing dragon. can't say smoking dried willow bark sounds particularly appealing, but the pipe is useful for keeping Sandy occupied from speaking and helps him out of a situation where he's being assaulted by six knights. He breathes this huge puff of smoke through his helmet and the cloud of smoke scares them away. Sandy wants to take their horses, but of course this isn't possible logistically, and Sandy then goes and tells the knights that they must meet them at Arthur's court in two days, and they will henceforth be knights in service of the Boss. These terms they agree to.
There are seven knights in total and Hank wants to hear from them. And as Sandy is a rather obtuse story teller, begins telling of Gawaine and Uwaine. Her story is a direct recounting of episodes from Malory.
The two knights are going through the forest and come across a group of women around a white shield on a tree. And they're taking turns spitting and throwing mire on it. Curious as to why this is, the ladies tell the knights that there is a knight of a white shield who hates women and so the women hate him back. Marhaus, the king's son of Ireland, is his name. And during Sandy/ Malory's tale, Hank is prone to correcting Sandy's archaic grammar.
They encounter Marhhaus, and there is some fighting, and this is where Hank gives us that quote, criticizing Malory that I read earlier.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
Gawaine and Marhaus are fighting each other all night and Hank's attention wanes and after a while, they voluntarily stop fighting and kiss one another and Hank falls asleep. What a waste of productivity it is for men to hack each other for six hours and not do anything useful with this kind of strength.
When he wakes, Sandy is still going on, this time having Marhaus talk and Hank says she should really give him some Irish brogue to spice it up. He specifically mentions "Bejaber's" as the phrase, which kind of gave me flashbacks to "New Steam Man" there.
But Sandy mentions three damsels: one age 60, another age 30 and another age 15, which brings Hank to think of a hello girl in his own time.
JM:
Yeah, so this reminded me, does anybody know where the phrase "damsel in distress" first came from?
Nate:
No.
Gretchen:
I'm not sure.
JM:
I don't, but I'm thinking that it might have come from somebody who is reading those stories, like Twain for example, being like, oh yeah, it's another damsel in distress because that is how the Malory always calls it. It's always the women who are hanging out at the castles or whatever, the damsels in the possession of the giants and so on. It's kind of funny, I don't know. It's just the damsels are not usually, I mean, if the men and their smiting and so on is pretty repetitive and dull, the damsels are even more so because they literally don't do anything much but sit there needing to be rescued.
Nate:
Yeah, and this is, I guess the biggest problem I have with this section of the Malory, is where it's these episodic adventures of basically the knights saving women from evil knights or monsters or whatever. And none of it feels like any human character. There's like no emotion here, there's no pacing in the plot. It's just like a whole bunch of stuff that's happening for seemingly no reason. The death of Arthur's segment, I think Malory, again, he's copying from a better author that knows how to plot and pace things out. But even in Malory, it feels more human and it feels like these are actually people interacting with one another and like actual characters and things like that. But from the bits that Sandy is quoting here, it's really reflective of like a very, very big chunk of Malory that is just kind of tedious to read, especially if you're not taking them in like very small chunks.
JM:
Yeah, well, Twain doesit all for you, he gives you the Mystery Science Theater version.
Nate:
He does. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I think that's kind of what you need with Malory sometimes. Taking them all in one go is a bit much.
But yeah, so Hank is thinking of a hello girl in his own time. And this is where his mind is for a while. He's not paying attention to what Sandy's saying. So they eventually come across a large castle and Sandy says it's not the one they're looking for. But he does see a curious sight: a knight with a sign that reads, "persimmon soap, all the prime-donnas use it" on a sandwich board. Yeah. And Hank is thinking this would undermine the church. It's all part of his subversive missionary plan.
JM:
It's all his attempt to turn everything into a big, big billboard.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, these signs with slogans on them became the fashion of the day. And it doesn't look like anybody can seem to read them. His missionaries create them and also introduce soap to the knights they encounter on the road, which is being produced in his soap factory.
JM:
And it's so funny because I can see, all right, like on one level, yeah, maybe I can see some value in what you're doing. But on the other hand, it's so stupid. It's like these guys walking around with soap advertisements.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a very ridiculous, absurd scenario, and again, something he captures very well. Yeah. But yeah, so they introduce soap to the knights, giving them modern bathing.
And they encounter this knight La Cote Male Taile in the service of Morgan Le Fay, who is the sister of King Arthur. And it's her castle they are now approaching. He's in low spirits as his attempts to wash a hermit had failed. But Hank suggests "patronized by the elect" as a slogan for his bulletin board, which makes him in high spirits again. La Cote has a rather foul woman with him, somebody like Sandy, but one who curses and insults, and he can't get rid of her, even after intentionally losing in duels in the hopes that that will make her leave. They're admitted to the castle and Hank is struck by Morgan's beauty, ageless and black at heart. King Urians is there as is Uwaine, and at first, Le Fay seems normal, but when a page trips and loses his balance, she quickly stabs him with a dirk, killing him. She keeps a tight hold on the servants. And when Hank accidentally compliments King Arthur, they are seized and commanded to be thrown in the dungeons. But when she realize it's the Boss, she calls off her men. She says she foresaw his coming and played this little rouse to try to get him to vaporize the guards with fire. Her desire to see anybody killed really grows until they are interrupted by the call to prayer as the church is certainly the true king of the land. And I guess this is one interesting element that really comes out in the medieval texts, especially certain parts of Malory, is the ever presence of the church over everything else in the land.
JM:
Is it just a general religiosity or is it like the kind of thing that Twain was kind of getting at in this whole critique?
Nate:
It's definitely the thing that Twain was getting at in this whole critique. I mean, it's never really explicitly spelled out that the church is the true king of the land and has the power to manipulate all the worldly kings in ways they see fit for corrupt purposes, but it's shown consistently throughout Malory and the French medieval sources that the church and the papacy is basically the people running the show. And King Arthur pays deference to them when the papacy tells King Arthur, "no, you can't do this". King Arthur immediately listens and bends to their whim. And in Malory and the medieval stuff, they're not portrayed as being corrupt exploiters, but...
JM:
But wise.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. But I think Twain is able to see how the situation was really being played out.
So after the call to prayer, there is a huge dinner. An early version of the hymn "In the Sweet Bye and Bye" is played. The song is offensive and the composer is to be hung afterwards. And you can hear an even more offensive rendition of this hymn, I guess, earlier in the episode. I don't know where I'm gonna place it, but it's incredibly, incredibly obnoxious. So enjoy.
The drinks and the dishes are served. Everyone is getting quite drunk and telling bawdy stories, when an elderly lady with white hair curses the queen, saying she killed her grandchild, the page from earlier.
JM:
Yeah, and I actually, I think I missed it first. I don't know if it was made that apparent at first, who that was. Like, I know, okay, it makes sense that someone would come out and condemn her for one of her misdeeds in the past. But I didn't realize that she was supposed to be the grandmother or mother of that page she killed till a bit later. I don't know if that was something that Twain made obvious right away.
Nate:
No, I don't think he explicitly spells it out at first. I think she's just like cursing out the queen. But the queen does not take any of this and demands that she be burned alive at the stake. And Sandy tells the queen to revoke the command or the Boss will make her castle disappear, which of course catches him off guard, but it has the desired effect. And the queen consults with him about hanging the composer, which Hank does agree to, and the whole band too after hearing it performed again. So he probably won't like mine.
JM:
Boss was gonna do his usual thing and like countermand and be all like, "no, you mustn't do such unwholesome things!" Then hears the music and he's like, "yeah, you know what, you're right, just do it. And it makes her feel better about her day as well.
Nate:
Yeah, right, she's very bloodthirsty.
But later on when the party dies down, they hear a scream, and the queen says it's somebody on the rack, and they show him. An anonymous informant says that the man on the rack had killed a stag on royal property, but this is a ridiculous way to do justice with no trial, as is the horrible torture unjust for the crime, even if a conviction was fairly reached. There is a woman in the room and the Boss has the queen and her men sent out as he wants to speak with the prisoner and the woman alone. The Boss tells them that he'll free the man, but the man says it was actually him who shot the deer. He didn't confess to get a quick death as if he did, the state would be able to rob the wife and baby, so he's enduring torture for their well-being. This is no problem as Hank is arranging for the both of them to go to his man factory. Musing on the executioner and the church, the Boss feels that concentrated power is bad and that the church should be split up into 40 pieces, just like the states in America. He punishes the executioner by making him the head of the band and the queen is quite outraged at all of this in the morning. She is intelligent but beholden to the foolish ways of her time and can't see justice and thinks it's naturally right that she can just kill her subjects whenever she wants for whatever reason. He asked the queen to see her jail cells and in the cells he sees separated a husband and wife who were there for refusing to let the noble sleep with the wife on their wedding night. He decides to reunite them, but they are so broken that they barely notice each other's presence. He decides to free all but one prisoner, a nobleman who destroyed a public well and notices that most people are there for spite, not out of any real offense. Morgan delights in tormenting one prisoner in particular for over 20 years for the crime of having red hair. Upon their release into the daylight, they are a confused horrid spectacle and Hank blurts out that he wished he could photograph the scene. Morgan's quick to chime in that she'll do it for him and her idea of photographing the scene of course is to get an axe and run at the people with it.
JM:
That's adorable.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
This is kind of episodic too, but it's done in a way where there's still a lot of, he manages to put a lot of pathos into it for the fact that we don't really know these people and they're not really characters in the book. Like, we don't see them again.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But we still kind of like, he still plays on our imagination just enough that we can kind of imagine what it's like. And it's like, suddenly it's not a 100% silly story anymore and I love that he can do that.
Nate:
Yeah. And the episodic nature of it never gets tedious. Like, it's not like we're getting 20 jousting scenes in a row. All the episodes are fairly different as far as what happens and I guess what he's trying to tell us is a bit different in each one. I guess with Morgan Le Fay, he's kind of commenting on the cruelty of the time versus the whole Merlin incident, commenting on the frauds and the charlatans who exploit the gullible.
JM:
And she's not mentioned again after this.
Gretchen:
I feel like also it's similar in the way that like "Huck Finn", sometimes it's very episodic but it all like connects together and like has, again, there's something that holds it together and makes it meaningful.
JM:
There are themes to it that resound throughout.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
So this is definitely one of the, I guess, more exaggerated and ridiculous incidents, I guess, out of many, but yeah, the Morgan Le Fay scene is cool.
JM:
She was fun and she was used a lot more in the adaptation but not as well. So it's as funny because people can't seem to get away from Morgana Le Fay. Like she's the compelling evil sorceress and when she comes in the second half of "Excalibur", it's like, oh, the ante is upped now, right? And it's like, she's the figure in a lot of the stories but Twain doesn't use her very much beyond this. She doesn't really come back. Mordred's mentioned again, but I don't even know if he mentioned that he's supposed to be Morgana's son.
Nate:
Yeah, she doesn't really play an enormous role in Malory either. I mean, she has like some parts but she isn't like the whole archetype.
JM:
She's not a damsel, so I guess she doesn't belong.
Nate:
She does play a minor role in "Sir Gawain in the Green Knight", which I think is interesting that she shows up there. But yeah, so leaving Morgan behind, our hero is now set off again and Sandy is resuming her story about Marhaus.
JM:
Right where she left off.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
It's just like Manowar stopping in the middle of a solo to tell people not to stage dive. Picking right up. Sorry, that's kind of an obscure reference.
Nate:
Yeah, it's fun.
But we're at how he did battle with the Duke of the South Marches and his six sons, who are the very same knights that are now in Hank's service. So in trying to work out the logistics of how many sons he had, the ages of the various people involved, he asked Sandy her age, which makes her very quiet. They see a knight approaching, bearing the sign, "use Peterson's prophylactic toothbrush, all the go". It's a good sign, as this is Sir Madok de la Montaine. Noyoudon't, is the toothpaste in question. And the knight is chasing after the stove polish man, a sir Ossaise of Surluse. After explaining the situation, he takes a spear and goes onwards. Hank and Sandy eventually come up to one of the people they recently freed from prison, reunited with family after 50 years. It's a bit of a somber scene as the prisoners are so broken mentally, furthering the need for a revolution in the social order.
Two days later, they approach the Ogre Castle and it appears to be no castle at all, but a pigsty. Sandy swears that there's some enchantment about as she says she sees it as a glorious castle. So the boss plays along. It would appear the ladies are all hogs and the ogres are swine herds. So the boss just buys the hogs for a few more than they're worth, much pleasing everybody involved.
JM:
Yeah, and I didn't like, I mean, this whole thing put a weird thing in my head because Twain sometimes, you know, he makes you want to relate to his characters and kind of like feel that they're real people. And then he's had, he has Sandy who's kind of like, apparently so deceived that she perceives this, right? And Sir Boss, Hank, is embarrassed. Like he's kind of, he feels, what is it? He says he's embarrassed for the whole human race. Yeah. And it's kind of like, it's kind of funny. Like he makes Sandy kind of a pathetic character, but he's still like, Boss really likes her, obviously. I mean, we get to that more towards the end, but like, it's kind of interesting, right? Like he's so easy to make fun of her, but at the same time, and I think that might be a Twain thing, right? Like he said he would do this to his friends, right? So he kind of trashed them, you know, and expects them to take it, but.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, this part in particular does seem very much an inversion of the "Don Quixote" roles of Sandy fulfilling the part of Don Quixote and the boss fulfilling the part of Sancho Panza. You know, instead of it's the foolish knight who sees the hallucinations and the wise squire, the roles are now reversed. Kind of interesting play on it, but definitely very not flattering for Sandy as a character.
JM:
If you like, or somebody who just spends time thinking about the characters and wanting to identify with them, sometimes you get thrown off by stuff like this.
Nate:
Yeah, but they have a lot of trouble driving the hogs back. Certainly rather strange scene as Sandy insists on respecting the ladies according to their noble titles. And one particular, the troublesome old sow of the lot had to be called my lady and your highness like the rest. And the illustration for here is Queen Victoria as a hog, capturing, the most troublesome old sow of the lot. So illustrator really pulling no punches.
JM:
Yeah, well, forget, forget mocking Malory. Now we're mocking, now we're mocking Queen Vic.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Wonder how many British reviews mentioned that.
JM:
Yeah, one of the bios said they were surprised that he had any English friends left.
Nate:
Yeah. Pretty savage, but when they do get them back home, exhaustion is setting in, but the bustle of the nobility makes sleep impossible. There's some nice discussion of Sandy's willingness to accept enchantments, but how modern inventions like the telephone would seem totally crazy to her. Sandy treats the hog ladies to a feast in the morning and the boss is surprised to learn that this isn't Sandy's house at all and they've just busted in on somebody uninvited. Sandy views it as a great honor for the host and the question of where to return the hogs comes up. Sandy says they are from all corners of the earth.
JM:
Oh, great. Do we have to go there? Yeah, how much smiting is that going to involve?
Nate:
Yeah, quite a bit.
JM:
I don't like violence!
Nate:
Yeah. So they leave the hogs to be treated as nobility and upon setting out encounter a group of pilgrims, much like Chaucer describes, loud and telling bawdy tales. They are on the way to the Valley of Holiness in the Cuckoo Kingdom, which is two days away, that was once without water until an abbot prayed and then a stream appeared out of the blue. However, upon treating it as a bath, the stream was rebuked and dried up again. And after a great prayer and supplication, the stream had returned and the town was prosperous afterwards as a site of a religious order.
JM:
Only dirty hermits are welcome here.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
No bathing!
Nate:
So they encounter another procession, this time manacled slaves in chains being whipped by their captors. The initial group of pilgrims comment on how well the slave master handles the whip. And the boss wants to free the slaves, but he can't lest he develop a reputation for riding over the country's laws, something that rends his heart as he witnesses a husband and wife forcibly separated. He encounters one of his knights, Sir Ozana Le Cure Hardy, clad in a stovepipe hat, who has just himself come from the Valley of Holiness. He reports that the water again has dried up and they've tried to get Merlin to help, but to no avail. And the boss sends Ozana a paper with a request for items from his chemical laboratory and sends him off with a dispatch to Camelot. Arriving at the valley, it's in a somber stillness. The males have been given lodging and the women are sent to the nunnery. He tells the abbot that he doesn't want to undercut Merlin out of professional courtesy and this buys him some time so he can prepare his magic. The monks are in good spirits, eating and jesting well, and the boss even gets a good story in.
The next day Merlin is hard at work and the fountain appears to be a typical well. And the boss is at a great advantage over Merlin who is just performing like weird incantations and rites and stuff outside of the structure rather than actually looking at his construction. The well chain goes 98 feet down and he thinks it's sprung a leak at the bottom and he lowers himself down with a candle and confirms that this is indeed the case. It's a pretty easy fix and there's no need for an elaborate show with dynamite.
JM:
But of course he has to have one.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Because he is Sir Boss.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
That's how he does his miracles.
Nate:
Very much a showman.
JM:
A performer.
Nate:
He makes a point by not saying the fix is easy, but rather gives the impression that it's quite difficult. There's some more back and forth with Sandy with her not understanding 19th century slang and being incredibly verbose in her 6th century speech, her phrasing and diction being quite similar to how Germans speak, he thinks.
JM:
Yeah, so Twain wrote an essay in maybe the late 1870s called "The Awful German Language", after spending some time in Germany and Switzerland, and it was basically just writing back home about how, hang on, I have a quote. "Some of the words are so long that they have perspectives like the receding line of railroad lines."
Nate:
Yeah, he definitely is going to be making fun of that pretty shortly. The question of if the Hermits are available is easier to get at by just busying them rather than asking Sandy. So they go out and one of the Hermits is being quite animated in his movement that he can be used for textile manufacture. Checking in on Merlin, who is quite engaged in making some dark smoke. And after some exaggerated gestures, he collapses and says it's beyond his power. The boss says he could possibly help, but needs everybody around the well to leave for a period from sunset to when the ban is lifted. And he's quite confident that he could pronounce the evil spirit's name, a Russian name, and break the spell. Merlin, figuring he'll die in the attempt. But the boss's men come in with supplies from the 19th century and they start setting up for a demonstration, involving a series of pumps, pipes, and electrical wiring to explosives. And when it's all ready, summons the crowd for the show. There's some Latin chanting for effect. And he pronounces a series of huge nonsense words in a dramatic fashion. Very German sounding, ridiculous, 50 character compound nonsense words.
JM:
So did anyone else try to say them? Yeah, I admit it. Aadmit it. You tried. The last one I definitely could not manage, the big one at the end.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah. They're very long words. And this is what it is.
JM:
They're great, but it's just like, yeah. I've listened to the audiobook to see how the guy does it. Yeah.
Nate:
But this is one of those things where the 1889 printing prints the long words in that German Gothic font to get the point across more.
JM:
Oh, great.
Nate:
And certainly the words are quite frightening enough for the audience at hand. While he's nearing the end of the first word, he hits a switch, which causes a blue glow to illuminate the crowd, astonishing them. And then he speaks several more 50 character words. Green, red, and purple fires subsequently appear after each word. And when he's ready to speak the final portion, he signals for the pumps and rockets and pronounces the name of the evil spirit, which this one looks a little more Russian than German.
JM:
So I just want to say that for some reason, none of the adaptations that I know of include this part, which is weird because it would be a perfect, if you really wanted to pull something from Twain, that was like a visual extravaganza, man, you show it. You want to show it off. Dramatic over the top. Bringing the waters out of the well with all the explosions and fireworks. Yeah. Industrial light and magic, literally.
Nate:
Yeah. So the name is pronounced, the rockets explode in midair in a dazzling show, and the pumps spurt out all the water, and the entire crowd falls in reverence, Merlin most astonished out of all of them. He wants a bath, and the boss tells the Abbott that he has special knowledge on how to make the water not go away, and then a few days to have the baths running again to even more fanfare. He develops a bit of a cold, and decides to wander the country as a freeman peasant, so he can mingle with the lower classes. And one of the hermits he visits, he notices that there is a telephone installation with somebody speaking to a hello girl. It turns out they are one valley over in the Valley of Hellishness. Clarence is summoned and told of the success in restoring the water, and Arthur has been assembling a standing army at West Pointer, somewhat a cause for concern, as it wasn't done with the boss's guidance. Clarence patches him through to West Pointer, and he speaks with the superintendent and gives him some instructions as well as requests a fountain pen, paper, and some matches. When he gets back to the monastery, there's a new magician there who has just arrived, a celebrity from Asia who can claim to tell what anyone is doing at any moment in time. And he reports on the doings of various monarchs, and when the boss asks him to tell him something, he asks him what he's doing with his right hand. He's, of course, unable to do it. And he talks his way out of it, saying, it applies to only people of royal birth, and says their king, Arthur, is currently asleep, to which the boss says, no, he's not. He's out riding. And after an argument, the enchanter says the king is asleep, but will be riding in a different direction tomorrow.
JM:
Yeah, and then I think it's at this point, I said to myself now, "hey, sometimes Sir Boss, sometimes you're no fun". I was like, he just put on this big show, but God forbid somebody else should put on a show.
Nate:
Right, yeah. Right?
Nate:
He's got to be the boss.
Gretchen:
I'm the only one that can be showman. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I was like, there you go. The guy wants to do his Asian trick, and be a sorcerer, fortune teller, and you can't even let him have that.
Nate:
Yeah. And he certainly doesn't, because the boss, of course, knows the truth of King Arthur's movements via his telephone network, and he promises that he's right. And the king is surely riding to this very valley. And, of course, King Arthur comes, and the abbot is stressed out that they can't receive him in full fanfare, and the rival magician is just turned out completely embarrassed and ruined.
Gretchen:
Yes, Sir Boss maintains his monopoly as a magician.
Nate:
He does.
JM:
The monopoly on magic showmanship. He's like the guy that's spoiling the magic trick at this point. Yeah.
JM:
So, when Hank isn't around to boss things, stuff gets kind of wrong, like the examinations for the army officers. The king, of course, always places the nobility first, and really everyone else does too, even unconsciously. Even the average person venerates them above his own kind. And while Sir Boss works to abolish the royal grant through underhand means, he still can't get any of his Westpointers appointed.
But for a while now, Sir Boss has had the idea that he's going to go traveling the kingdom as a poor freeman and learn how the real people live. And when the king hears of this, he thinks, it sounds a novel and fun adventure. So he declares he wants to go with the boss. And here we get confirmed that the king is, well, I guess the term would be cuckolded. And she doesn't care where he goes, so long as Lancelot is around. That is Guinevere, of course.
Nate:
Yeah, it's very apparent in both the Malory and the French Vulgate that Lancelot and Guinevere are sleeping with one another right under Arthur's nose and he's just an oblivious fool.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, the idea that Arthur might be a bit of a dupe is not new.
Nate:
No, it's definitely not.
JM:
So the first newspaper arrives. The weekly Hosanna and Literary Volcano. Hank calls it good Arkansas journalism. "A bit too loud". Doesn't quite please the boss as much as he would have hoped. And we haven't really mentioned "Kindred" yet. This is a little weird way to mention it, but there was also a dig at Arkansas in "Kindred", which I thought was kind of funny and which it seemed to be Arkansas journalism is it might be okay, but it's not really good for the rest of everybody else, kind of thing. But the more respectable Court Circular seems to do better. It's all well and good, but who's going to read it? The monks don't even recognize that it's English. Well, what would become English, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, time is, again, the whole King Arthur thing is very anachronistic. Because I mean, yeah, this century is before the not only before the Norman conquest, but before the Viking conquest. So everybody in England would be Celtic speaking.
JM:
So boss wouldn't be able to understand anybody.
Nate:
No.
JM:
And nobody would be able to understand him.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So but that's compared to the adaptations of this work, the liberties of that nature are minor. But yeah, it's still a thing.
Nate:
Right. But I mean, like that the legends themselves are anachronistic. I mean, Twain is kind of playing that up.
JM:
For sure. I mean, the whole book is about anachronism, isn't it?
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So Arthur and Boss set out on their wandering adventure. Arthur nearly gets them killed a whole bunch of times because he won't act humble. They're supposed to be peasants. One time it's so bad that Boss has to throw a bomb he made for emergencies, and a whole bunch of knights and horses are obliterated. Arthur asks Boss why he doesn't try to stop him from doing foolish things before he does them. And they talk about prophecy. And Boss announces loftily that his prophetic limit is 1300 years. And there's a funny scene of Boss trying to get King to walk like a peasant. And his kingly bearing is showing and we can't have that. So they practice walking up to a house and the king automatically says, "Varlet, bring me a seat!" Here the illustrator draws a parallel between 6th century nobles and southern slave owners apparently. And the "robber baron" idustrial types in America. So finally, Arthur offers to take their bag of provisions so he can help get his shoulders to stoop.
So then we get some political digressions that start to really creep in here. And I don't know, one of the biographers says these are boring, but I don't really mind them. I think Twain is pleasant and personable enough that they're not too... They interrupt the narrative, but they're not unpleasant to me.
Nate:
They don't go on for that long either, it's not like he's going on for 30 pages or whatever.
JM:
Yeah, and this is a little bit on the nose, but I'm going to quote the end of chapter 28 here, because I mean, I think it's a pretty good... Basically, Twain stops the plot here because he's talking about labor and he's talking about how unfair he thinks the whole situation is. "There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about the working class and satisfy themselves that a day's hard 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. So far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe 30 days. But I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down. And I will be satisfied too. Intellectual work is misnamed. It is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work and... As for the magician with the fiddle-bow on his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him. Why, certainly he is at work,if you wish to call it that, but... Lord, it's a sarcasm, just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair. But there it is, and nothing can change it. The higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay and cash also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship."
Of course, just had to get that dig in at the end there, right? But, I mean, it's a powerful passage, you know, and I think it's the passages like this that really captured me a lot when I was younger, I think. Like, the first couple of times I read this book. And then later, maybe it was a little bit more cynical because I follow the path that a lot of modern people do, or the idea that if you just try your best, you'll be awesome, and everything in life will be great, and you'll make lots of money is kind of a fallacy for most of us, right?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But the household they visit has been stricken with smallpox, and the king has moved to help the sick woman. The husband is dead, but the woman is happy because he died in peaceful delusion that they were young again together. And the boss admires Arthur for bravely bringing down the sick girl. But, of course, Arthur doesn't know anything about contagion.
The woman tells how her family, essentially slaves of the manor lord, were broken up as her boys were sent to the dungeons for a crime they didn't commit: Cutting down trees. And the husband and wife were fined and forced to harvest crops with no compensation in pay or food. When the woman got sick, she blasphemed against the church in front of the priest, and so the church put the curse of Rome on the place. By one of those wild coincidences that usually happens in books, but sometimes in reality too, it's just then the sons who were imprisoned arrive. They escaped the dungeons somehow, and the king is very conflicted. He says he's not sorry they escaped, but they have a duty to apprehend the men. No sooner does Boss convince the king that they should leave than they come upon some hanged men, and Boss wants to cut them down. But the king says it's useless. The storm has come up, and they're dead men already anyway. The nearby manor is on fire, and there is a chase going on. Someone has killed the master brutally. Suspicion is rampant. The two wanderers get lodged for the night at a humble home, and they hear the story of the manor.
The three escapees are cousins of the husband, and they are reluctant but feel compelled to turn them in. That is the townspeople. And Boss takes the man aside, and they have a talk. And everyone is secretly glad the Baron is dead, but they all pretend to have zeal for capturing and killing his murderers. Boss dreams of his republic; the abolishment of the monarchy, and the institution that degrades the people.
So they come upon some children imitating their elders by hanging a boy, and they rescue him. And again, I couldn't help but think of "Kindred" when I read this part, because we kind of saw a similar passage in that book. The children of slaves that were imitating what they saw going on around them. And there were actually quite a lot of parts in this that reminded me of the book we just did. So it was kind of neat to be doing these two together, even though, you know, they're not necessarily linked per se. I mean, I'm not sure how much she might have been influenced by Twain, but it's still a neat thing that we did these two together, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, this part in particular here has a lot of commentary on slavery and its comparison to medieval feudalism.
JM:
Twain has sanitized it to an extent, too. And obviously, even though there's no doubt that he was thinking of the American South in his head when he wrote these parts. The fact that it's thousands of years in the past also helps him to distance from it. And for the audience, too, right? I'm sure he was thinking that most of his sympathetic audience would be Americans.
But in a small village, Boss is happy to know that the dollars have taken over the currency market. They're staying with a charcoal burner, and Boss decides to pay for a big feast for some of the local tradespeople. Boss seems to undercut everything by openly paying the account of the feast, which Marco the charcoal burner and his wife had hosted with such pride. And, I don't know, here's like, you know, it's just that, like, Boss can't help but take the credit, he can't help but have the show. I love him, but man, he's infuriating.
So it seems like the clerk came to collect early because they seem to make arrangements to do all the paying later, but I guess he just shows up because probably because there's so much stuff that he needs to pay for it somehow. The local blacksmith, a prosperous fellow who brags a little about his rich table, is humiliated. And then there's a lot of talk about economics, and in this realm, which is presided over by a small fry king of its own, they have a system of high tariffs in place, and while the wages are higher, goods also cost a lot more. So Boss demonstrates to the company that this is inefficient, and thus demonstrates Clemens' own position on the big presidential candidacy debate of 1888, where he switched to the Democratic side for free trade. So to Boss's chagrin, the blacksmith doesn't seem to see the error, and everyone else sides with him. Their wages are higher, therefore they're better off! Boss makes grand eloquent speeches talking for abolishment of the pilory, which many protest. And he basically ruins the after-dinner party by demonstrating that they could all be in peril of informants. So they have no reason to trust Boss, so they all panic. And there's literally a money shot. A double barrel toy gun that spits coins. Weird. So suddenly the king wakes up from a nap, and Boss is uneasy because he feels the king is getting ready for a performance of his own. And of course Boss doesn't criticize his own antics, but yep, the king, the false farmer, is going to start talking about agriculture. Everyone is petrified, including the boss, really, and the king believes onions come from trees, and uh-oh, it's a lot of crap, and he says a whole bunch of nonsense. And the company is now turned against them, and it's like, "one would betray us! The other is mad! Kill them! Kill them!" And it's a full-scale fight, and the king is happy, finally! They run for it, the charcoal burner Marco and a mob of men and dogs on their heels. And they hide in a tree, and for a while. The mob smokes them out, though, after not too long. And there's more brawling. And then some horsemen show up, led by a lord of some kind, aptly named Grippe. And they are lulled into a false sense of security overnight at an inn. And in the morning, encounter the slave procession they met earlier, where Boss and King are cuffed and made to fall into line. And they're sold at auction, because they can't prove they are freemen. Boss notes the same thing happened in the US south, 1300 years later, to thousands of people. Boss is briefly incensed that they sell for such a low price, but the king is downright insulted. A whole month passes. A slave dealer tries to beat submission into the king, who every market crowd thinks has some kind of lofty air or style, and it doesn't do any good. Suddenly, the king is the biggest opponent of the slavery thing you could hope to find, and Boss is sort of gratified. And now, the resolve to escape becomes foremost. They have some adventures on the road. And again, kind of going back to what Nate said earlier, a plot synopsis really doesn't do it justice. A lot of it is, it kind of details that Twain throws into the text. It's just like, there's so many little things, and some of them are funny, and some of them are sad, and some, like, they all just pack something. And again, you can kind of picture listening to him tell you the story, and being spellbound by his oratorical skill, I guess. But there's a snowstorm, and this crazy, beaten woman running into their midst with a torch-baring mob crying out for her blood. It's a witch! And they burn her, and the slaves are warmed by the fire. A young girl who's hanged for stealing a piece of cloth while grieving herself over her lost husband and child.
And now, they're in Londinium, a big, chaotic village. The king has a palace there, and they see people they know, but it's forbidden to speak to chained slaves. Boss even sees Sandy riding by. Boss sees that progress is going along swimmingly with newsboys in the crowd, and telephone and telegraph wires sprouting into the distance. Boss has a brilliant scheme to pick the padlocks and free himself and the king, beat up the master, and put him in chains, and go to Camelot or something. Well, it almost works, but he doesn't get to free the king after all, and during the fight, the night watch comes, and Boss is marched to prison. It's then that he realizes, in a sudden lantern light, that he's been drubbing the wrong man. In fact, the guy he was fighting wasn't the master at all. And Boss Hank manages to muddle his way through court and get free, surprisingly, to return to his master whom he pretended to be running an errand for. In the slave quarters, everyone's gone with the battered and bloody body of the master. The slaves revolted, of course, and were caught and sentenceed within minutes. Now, Boss manages to get to the telegraph office and wire Clarence. "Send help! Knights in armour and Sir Lancelot!" They should arrive tomorrow, but now he gets himself caught again. Since they found the missing slave, the hanging is to happen immediately. Oops. The day is beautiful as they are marched to the scaffold. Arthur now declares himself king of the Britons! But, of course, nobody will listen. They're about to ang, Arthur, when what should the boss see but a whole gaggle of knights riding at speed on bicycles. "On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the king! Who fails shall sup in hell tonight!" crows the boss. Clarence is beaming with pride.
Remember the thing with Sir Sagramore? The promised duel years back? Well, the knight hasn't forgotten, and Sir Hank Boss sees the announcement in the paper one morning. And he knows the truth, as described by Clarence. It's not really a battle between him and the returned knight, but between him and Merlin, his rival magician, who has been helping Sagramore with charms and incantations and such to bolster him for the fight. So Hank feels the whole of knight erranttry and superstition against him and his reason and logic and science. Sagramore comes out in all his armor and pomp, looking like a piece of industrial landscape with a huge lance, and the crowd goes wild. They laugh at Hank because he's in gym clothes. He looks like a wrestler. Meanwhile, Merlin puts a veil on Sagermore, described as "dainty gossamer", which is supposed to make him invisible to his enemy. After some dashing about sport that makes Sagramore mad, Sir Boss lassoes him and yanks him right off his horse. The crowd goes nuts and they want another contender. The knights keep sending bigger and bigger champions till Boss lassoes Sir Lancelot himself. That works, and all in Sir Boss is about to bask in his victory, but wait! Sir Sagramore is back to fight again, and this time the lasso is gone, stolen by sneaky Merlin! And Sagramore means business now. Someone's going to die! Merlin plays along, sort of, saying, there is but one lasso because it belongs to the king of the sea demons. Lancelot takes Boss aside and offers him a sword, but Sagramore insists that Boss choose the weapon and should fight with his own. Well, Merlin, Sir Boss does have another trick up his sleeve, or rather his holster, a revolver. He just shoots Sagramore dead through the heart. And everyone is, of course, astonished, and Hank Morgan challenges the whole chivalric institution to come against him at that moment! And, to his surprise, they do. What nobody else knows is that he only has 12 shots. Nine are enough, though. They concede defeat, and the day is his. Boss proclaims, errant knighthood is dead!
Now, Sir Boss was sort of bluffing earlier when he took on all of knighthood, but now he must be serious. The challenge is ongoing, and public put up on notice boards and all for everyone to see. Sir Boss unveils all his civilized bastion of progress: schools, mines, factories, railroads, to the country. Sir Boss has no trouble For three years, it doesn't really deign to describe them much. Slavery's dead and gone, there's equal taxation, and an author of a volume of jokes is hung for offending Sir Boss's sensibilities with an old groaner that he hates. The formerly errant knights are now gainfully employed doing useful things. The round table is a stock exchange now. The nobles of the nearby realms are even learning to play baseball, in their armor, of course. And that was the most significant thing about the 1990s adaptation, the baseball, remember?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that was really important. But aside from the baseball, which is cute, don't y'all think it's a bit sad? The life of an umpire is a short one, though, in Hank's world. Hank wants to tear down Catholicism, and he wants to introduce universal suffrage after Arthur's death. Even for women, though only older women, it seems. And again, this was something that didn't entirely meet with Samuel Clemens' approval, apparently, until later on in life. So there will be a republic, though, and Hank Morgan will be its president, he feels. Clarence, though, still believes in the necessity of a royal family. Amusingly, when Hank tries to convince him that kings are just dangerous, Clarence says, What about a royal family of cats? That would do just as well.? A whole royal line of Toms!
Oh yeah, and Hank and Sandy marry, and have a kid named Hello Central, a moniker she gave the child to please him, and honour perhaps, someone he lost. And we hear about it when the girl is struck with croupe. But before I continue, I just have a shout out for Clarence. What a delightful character.
Nate:
Yeah, he really is.
Gretchen:
yeah.
JM:
So if someone wants to do how we have all these things now that are popular, like the story of Victor Frankenstein's butler, and like the story of Dracula's coachman, and like all these, you know. He has life. Yeah, the story of the Connecticut Yankee, but through Clarence's perspective, and what happens to him afterwards. Somebody should write that. Come on, Twin fan fictioneers, get on it!
So Lancelot, who always seemed to like Boss and his things, helps to take care of the infant. After three days, Hello Central is doing somewhat better, and Sir Lancelot bids farewell. And that's the last time Hank ever sees him.
So the idea is to go on a cruise now, so Hello Central can have some sea air. This mirrors Clemens' own experience with Livy and his child.
It's while the family is on vacation in France that the shit really goes down. They're expecting a ship from home that never comes. Things look eerily quiet across the channel. Boss takes a boat to investigate with an uneasy feeling. It's like the apocalypse over there. The trains aren't running. No more news boys. No factory smoke. No electric lights. What could have happened? Camelot is as silent as the grave. The castle seems deserted. Clarence is there, though, ever faithful.
It all started with the stock market and Sir Lancelot playing dirty. The king's relatives, all noble knights, of course, are affronted. They decide to get theirs back by revealing Guinevere's adultery to the king. He knows she likes him, but doesn't suspect his friend of anything, apparently. The king orders an ambush for Lancelot, who kills nearly all the conspirators. Arthur's going to burn his wife, but Lancelot's party rescues her and kills a bunch more loyal knights, many near and dear to Sir Boss -- His baseball champs, you see. There's a massive battle with the king taking it to Lancelot, leaving the kingdom in the hands of Mordred, his nephew, who then tries to take over completely. There's more battle, and they almost have a truce finally when it's broken by accident. Arthur and Mordred kill each other, and it's epic and tragic.
Nate:
So what you just described is basically the entire plot of the death of Arthur, a segment of the French Vulgate, and then later Malory.
JM:
Right, and that's what John Boorman is riffing on in "Excalibur" as well. So yeah, he includes Morgane Lafay a lot more than, because she's just never mentioned here as being a key player.
Nate:
Right, and she's not in the French and Malory either.
JM:
So that makes sense, yeah. But Guinevere has gone into seclusion in a convent, and the church steps in with their interdict, and Sir Boss needs to be killed. Doctors on the crews were all servants of the church, and they were sure the boss was out of the way when everything went on. So even without the war, the church was already planning to end this civilization thing. Clarence has but 52 boys at his disposal. Literally boys, and they resolve to hole up in a big cave for a siege. They rig dynamite to all the factories and everything, which can be set off by triggering a specific wire. The whole thing will just go up in a massive fireball. And Clarence has had an electric fence built, a series of them actually. Two of them discuss power, and the most economical way to deal with a ground connection. It's kind of interesting. Well, one thing I was going to mention earlier, I kind of lost my train of thought and forgot, was, and it might as well bring it up now: this book and the Edisonades.
So we don't really have too much evidence that Twain read too many of these, like Frank Reed and his, this and that thing, and all that. But he certainly knew about them. In fact, his Tom Sawyer, what was it? Tom Sawyer
abroad or something like that? It was published in a magazine called St. Nicholas Magazine, and it was supposed to be a more savory, wholesome alternative to the dime novels, which were just kind of seen as being really trashy, right? So, and this was during the late 1890s when Mark Twain was kind of saying, Yeah, I'm pretty much just like a potboiler writer now, I'm just writing. Like he kind of got pushed into this. It's weird the position he was in, because Tom Sawyer was a book, although he started it without necessarily this intention. It was like a book for boys, right? Or boys and girls, he said, that it was a children's book. And that's kind of how it was meant and perceived for the most part.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And "Huckleberry Finn" was a sequel that got out of hand and turned into something else. Like it turned into this literary masterpiece that's considered like, you know, that's studied in high school and college and university classes all over the place. That's, you know, but it was really just a sequel to "Tom Sawyer". When it started, it just got away from him. Like it became more about something else. And Huckleberry Finn and Jim were way more interesting than Tom Sawyer in a lot of ways. But like, that's not how it started. And in the sequels that included Tom Sawyer and in one or two instances, Huckleberry Finn as well, they were definitely much more like juvenile. They were not far off from the dime novels or something like The Hardy Boys or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Right. So it's kind of interesting the way this is all kind of tied together. And a lot of this does feel kind of like an edisonade, doesn't it?
Nate:
Well, yeah, you got the lone inventor kind of building stuff and that's a huge component of those novels, even though I guess what they build is these weird like vehicle shaped like animals.
JM:
Yeah, but they weren't all like that.
Nate:
No, they weren't.
JM:
And it's just this whole thing of, it's not just the inventing, but like conquering a land. Yeah. Basically conquering something new.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, you know, the comparison that he comes early in the novel about him being like Robinson Crusoe having to invent and contrive and create something. It's present throughout the book.
Nate:
And I guess unlike the edisonades is Hank almost feels just here in conquering where the edisonades are just like mean-spirited and cruel.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, it mostly feels just but like, and you know, he always phrases it like, yeah, I'm combating evil institutions like slavery and the the enslaving church and stuff like that. Like, why would you argue with me? And yeah, I wouldn't argue with those things, but I don't know. He still has that like imperialist kind of mindset. And Twain was getting like more and more anti imperialist starting now pretty much.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think this is around the point in the novel where it does kind of turn into that direction of anti-imperialist sentiment.
JM:
Yeah. And going back to kind of what I said where Twain was writing a lot of his things episodically like, it could be that he was in a different place when he wrote this part than he was when he started. And that's like something that everybody I think who reads Twain probably has to consider. I mean, "Huckleberry Finn", which is generally considered his masterpiece was written over a period of like many years.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, he took a break for 10 years between like the last third or so is like 10 years later.
JM:
And he literally had no idea where he was going with it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He said several times that he was pissed off with it and he just wanted to burn the whole thing because he didn't know where to take it. And he's just like an inspiration happened to come to him, he would write it. But he wasn't above doing other things like taking bits from other things that he had written and just sort of incorporating them into that. Like there's a part of "Huckleberry Finn" that comes from another book, that can be found in both. I can't remember the name of the other one. It was inserted later on back into the "Huckleberry Finn" manuscript because it was in like the original manuscript. And then the publisher took it out and had it just maintained in this other thing that Twain had published. So he was always doing things like that, swapping things here and there, in and out. And I don't know, like it's not inconceivable to me that he started with this little dream sketch in his head of making fun of a guy slogging around in armor, struggling and being all uncomfortable and his nose itching and being so ridiculously hot and everything to like this massive political kind of statement that he's trying to make here. But also like the bloodbath at the end that's unprecedented that none of the contemporary reviewers seem to have even noticed or commented on. Yeah, which is crazy because like I read this a long time ago and that is like the one thing that really stuck out in my mind is that scene from my first read.
JM:
Yeah, besides like the technological adventure stuff, definitely from like my youngest reading of this book as a kid, this whole climax is definitely what stuck with me most as well. And the fact that like I wanted to be rooting for Sir Boss a character that I liked, but that I couldn't quite do it. So yeah, they're discussing the ground connection and they also have Gatling guns to mow knights down with and land mines as well. The latter were tested when a church committee came to demand submission and you can hear the report for a mile.
Boss says it's time to rise up and strike and proclaim the Republic, which they do. Allow me to read their proclamation:
", be it known unto all. Whereas the king, having died and left no heir, it becomes my duty to continue the executive authority vested in me until a government shall have been created and set in motion. The monarchy has lapsed. It no longer exists. By consequence, all political power has reverted to its original source, the people of the nation. With the monarchy, its several adjuncts died also. Wherefore, there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged class, no longer an established church. All men are become exactly equal. They are upon one common level and religion is free. A republic is hereby proclaimed as being the natural state of a nation when other authority has ceased. It is the duty of the British people to keep together immediately and by their votes elect representatives and deliver into their hands the government."
Sounds great. Sounds perfect. I like it.
Nate:
Good declaration there.
JM:
Yes, but it's perhaps an unfortunate circumstance that they've decided to hole up in what they still call Merlin's Cave. Doesn't bode so well. Hank spends a lot of time in the cave writing letters to Sandy, which she'll never receive. All the nation is against them. The knights come on and the mines go boom! Boss pushes a button and blows up all the factories. There's also an uncountable death toll, body parts and stuff everywhere. Hank feels bad about the massacre to come, so drafts an ultimatum, a surrender order, to the knights, which Clarence rightly laughs at, as it sounds more like a challenge. Of course, the knights would answer with the sword. Hasn't Hank figured it out yet?
Now it's time for the electric fences, as the knights send a few scouts and then come on as a body. The wires are instant death to all touch, and not to mention the armor, which means nobody can help anybody. The bodies are as if glued to the fences. Then, boss diverts the brook into the ditch created by the earlier explosion, and the remaining hosts are overwhelmed by a torrent of water. Then the gatling guns start up. It's 54 won against 25,000, all the corpses of which surround them. It makes the stand of the Spartans seem small. But man, what a lot of bodies. There's something really, really terrible about it, and it seems to presage the coming story of World War I as well.
Now, Hank's narrative ends abruptly, with the implication is that he's made a mistake. It has to be picked up by Clarence, the newspaper man.
So the boss, in an effort to be gallant, wants to help the wounded. Clarence thinks this is a ridiculous idea, there being so many bodies and all, but Boss won't be dissuaded. He gets stabbed for his trouble, of course. It's not mortal, and Clarence makes short work of the attacker.
But there's a newcomer in the cave. She's a peasant woman who says, she'll cook for the boys. Of course, now, Sir Boss is quite unable to do anything. A sickness starts, and Clarence is one of the first to be incapacitated. Clarence awakes to find the woman making passes of magic over the sleeping Boss. "Ye were conquerors! You be conquered! These others are perishing, ye also. Ye shall all die in this place! Everyone, except him. He sleepeth now, and shall sleep for 13 centuries. I am Merlin!" And then we have some mad laughter and reeling about, and Merlin electrocutes himself on one of the wires, dying in permanent mirth. And it's an awesome image, I must say.
Nate:
It really is, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Some part of me is sort of happy that Merlin got his back. I don't know, a little bit.
Nate:
Reading this kind of in close proximity to the Mr. Vivacius style Story, I wonder if Grunert had read Twain and kind of integrated that into his story at the end there. Because they both die in very similar ways.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's silly, but kind of awesome at the same time. Just to have him come back like that all of a sudden. I kind of saved the reveal to the last moment, but Clarence reveals it right away as soon as the person comes into the camp. There's no question of who it is, so he doesn't try to hide it or anything. But no doubt, if they were making a faithful adaptation, they would probably make it so that you couldn't tell who Merlin was until the last possible moment. You know, he's like, oh shit. Yeah, and then he dies like that. You know, it's silly, but he dies very happy knowing he's a triumphant at last. And the boss sleeps on and on. The boys agree to place the manuscript with the boss. His body will be hidden somewhere in the cave., And thus it ends. The manuscript that is.
And now we get a final postscript from Twain. It's a sad night as he finishes the manuscript. He goes to the stranger's door, which is slightly ajar. And hears him raving, sees him thrashing around in delirium. Hank thinks Twain is Sandy and brokenly calls for Hello Central. He talks of the strange dreams he had of the king being dead. Of a revolution and even being a stranger from 1300 years hence. Then the last. "A bugle! It is the king! The drawbridge. There. Man the battlements. Turn out the...". he was getting up his last effect. But he never finished it. And that's how the book ends.
And that is how you do an ending, like so sudden and so powerful.
Nate:
It is, yeah.
spoiler general discussion
(Music: synth ambience)
Nate:
That event kind of mirrored the real life death of Theodore Crane. In June of 1889, who Twain visited in his final days. It's interesting how these events of the last, I don't know, third or so of the book kind of mirror real life things that Twain had in mind.
JM:
I'm sorry, I didn't, I must have missed that. Tell me about that.
Nate:
So this incident is detailed in Gary Scharnhorst, "The Life of Mark Twain, the Middle Years", 1871 to 1891. And he says, quote, "when the Clemenses arrived at Quarry Farm on June 13, 1889, Theodore Crane was on the threshold of death. Mr. Crane could hardly last many days. He is very weak and begs pitifully for release. Sam wrote his sister Pamela. He was half a wreck physically and suffering a good deal of pain of a bodily sort together with a mental depression and hopelessness that made him yearn for death every day and break into impatience every time the sun went down on his unsatisfied desire. He had been dissuaded while in Hartford over the winter from taking his own life by Thomas Beecher, whose intervention shaped Sam's conclusion to "a Connecticut Yankee". In his early notes for the novel, the Yankee mourns his lost land, has come to England and revisited it, but it is all changed and becomes old, so old. And it was so fresh and new, so virgin before, has lost all interest in life and is found dead next morning, suicide. Much as Crane chose not to take his own life, Sam chose to allow Hank Morgan to die naturally too."
Gretchen:
I wasn't aware of that connection. I was thinking that it kind of parallels that scene in the plague house, the idea of someone going peacefully in kind of this delusional state and that being sort of the foreshadowing of what happened to Hank at the end.
Nate:
Yeah, it does feel like he wrote this episodically, possibly like "Huck Finn", where it just kind of tonally shifts around like the last third or so. Basically where you pick up JM with the plot summary with him and Arthur going adventuring. It just takes on that a much darker tone in his incidents, even though the humor is still there and it's definitely still very satirical in places. It feels less silly and less absurd and more of that kind of a dark cutting humor.
Gretchen:
Yeah, did you say that it was similar in tone to something? I forgot what we were talking about earlier that had a very similar tone shift. Don't mind me.
Nate:
I guess the Malory shifts tone a lot. I don't know if that's what you were thinking of.
Gretchen:
Perhaps that's what I was thinking of.
Nate:
Yeah, the Malory does shift in tone a lot. I mean, it's a bit of a jarring thing, but he kind of does it like, I guess, not intentionally. And I don't know, I think Twain, the way he structures the plot of the novel where he opens up with the kind of more lighthearted, sillier stuff and slowly introduces heavier themes throughout the course of the novel and makes it climax with this huge death toll and our heroes being trapped under the very corpse that they've created. It's a very grim end and he builds up to that point in both the plot taking us there, but also the, I guess, tonal heaviness also progresses as well as the plot does.
JM:
Yeah, it definitely seems like in the last third, the darkness and the seriousness is a little bit, whereas, yeah, the humor still pretty much stays around until, I don't know, until Clarence and the cats, basically, I guess. After that, it's kind of a little bit like the silliness is dispensed with after that and it becomes a little more fraught with dark incidents.
Nate:
Yeah. The parallels with slavery become a lot more apparent in the final third comparing it to the system of medieval feudalism, and it seems like that's really what Twain wanted to destroy. And I mentioned earlier to keep "Ivanhoe" in the back of your head, not because it is directly drawn from in terms of plot or as explicitly ridiculed, but because of, I guess, what to Twain, the ideas represent. And I want to read this quote. It is a little long, so bear with me, but I think it really kind of gets at what he's trying to do with this final third here. So in "Life on the Mississippi", Twain said on Walter Scott, "Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back, sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms, with decayed and swinish forces of religion, with decayed and degraded systems of government, with the silliness and emptiness's sham grandeurs, sham gods, sham chivalries and of a brainless and worthless long vanished society. He did measureless harm, more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them, but in our south they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the 19th century is curiously confused and commingled with Walter Scott Middle Age sham civilization. And so you have the practical, common sense, progressive ideas and progressive works mixed up with a duel, the inflated speech, the jejeune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the southerner, or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it, would be wholly modern, in place of a modern and medieval mixed, and the south would fully be a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the south a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war, and it was he also that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and case down here, and also reverence for rank and case, pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter."
JM:
So I'm glad I left that to you because you read a lot more of it than I was going to, and that's like, more appropriately used as well. I think, wow, that's, I mean, that almost seems serious, like, it's hard to know with Twain, right? Like, it's hard to know, he could be saying that, and yet really enjoy Walter Scott, but...
Nate:
Yeah, but I mean, I think he kind of has a point here and, I mean, he might be overstating, like, "Ivanhoe" being the major cause of the US Civil War, but like, I think there's something to it where Walter Scott presents a very romanticized version of these stories, but then plausibly grounds them in historical fact where somebody from the American South in the 19th century can like half pretend noble lineage or carrying on the legacy of chivalry in ways that sometimes we see like the far right doing today, you know, claiming this ancient link to a past like a great tradition of the West or whatever, which is just all based on nonsense, it's based on historical..
JM:
It reminds me of the characters in "Huckleberry Finn" too, the two fraud guys.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the Duke and the Dauphin.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
And even in "Huckleberry Finn", what I always remember, the first time I'd ever heard of Walter Scott is in "Huckleberry Finn", there's that shipwreck they come across that is called the Walter Scott.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just remember like those two guys who like kind of imposed themselves on Jim and Huck and like took over the raft and where they were going everything and they were the one was the Duke and the other was...
Gretchen:
The Dauphin.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah. And then, you know, like these two total hucksters claiming Royal lineage and stuff like that and going to picture them being these like ridiculous Southerners that at this point Twain is pretty much on point ready to lap on in his older years.
Nate:
But I think it's this attitude that of kind of a romanticized past and I guess giving the idea that there's some kind of innate tie to ancient aristocracy and that is somehow a justification for slavery and for these inhumane exploitation of people that persist throughout the majority of the 19th century. I mean, this is only written 24 years, I guess published 24 years after the end of the Civil War. He was probably thinking about some of the things a little bit earlier. The bio that I just quoted from talks about the fraught production of the stage version of "Prince and the Pauper" in the early 1880s, which I think is when the seed got planted in Twain's head for doing something along the lines of "Connecticut Yankee".
JM:
Yeah, and his attitudes about the British and Europe in general and it's like it seems to be very conflicted. He'll talk shit about it one day and then the next day he'll go live there and talk about how great it is, how like fun it is to be a part of this in this history. And now he can like write letters home from Vienna during the tumultuous time of the Kaiser and the 19 States and all this shit.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And he's kind of just living in it. He just wants to live in it. And sometimes, yeah, like he will write back caustic stuff about all kinds of things, including the things that he likes. So it's hard to tell. But with that criticism of Walter Scott, it feels, it feels a little bit genuine, you know, like a little bit like, yeah, maybe he means that more than some of the other things. I can't say for sure.
Nate:
Yeah, and I mean, I think it's clear that in the 19th century of Twain's time, people were reading Walter Scott a lot more than they were reading Malory and like the medieval King Arthur stories. I mean, Walter Scott was still hugely popular at that time.
JM:
Well, apparently it was considered anathema for him to be burlesquing Malory the way he was like he got criticized for a big time. But still, you're right.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it might be more of an English thing than an American.
JM:
Yeah, definitely more in England. But I mean, Walter Scott wasn't American either. So I don't know. But I guess.
Nate:
Yeah. But I mean, he kind of invented a new genre. And I mean, a lot of the pulp stuff we've looked at, those kind of pseudo-medieval romances like the Leslie Stone and "The Mummy!" or I'm sure there's a couple examples we covered on the podcast that like clearly are influenced.
JM:
Yeah, "The Mummy!" was even like a contemporary.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Yeah. But you can definitely see the line between Walter Scott and those kind of plots, that world construction, even though there might not be a direct influence there.
JM:
Yeah, interesting. He seems to have been felt all over.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, hugely influential author.
JM:
So yeah, I definitely feel like the ending is very effective and sad. And I don't know. I mean, it's funny that Twain does this because we have no reason to expect that the Yankee will die at this point, but he just does, right. And it's just so sudden too and it's almost like "I just met this really cool person. And this really amazing thing happened to me and I read this manuscript and I want to talk to him about it. But he's gone already."
Nate:
Yeah, and it kind of subverts our expectations to in that we meet him at the beginning of the novel before this flashback. So like, presumably he survives all of the events of the flashback. So like we know that going in. But he just pulls out at the very end. Yeah, it's so weird. I like to think that like he slept that whole time. And then he woke up like fairly recently. Like I don't know how recently but maybe a decade has previously or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
He's been kind of living this like shadow life ever since right? Hanging around watching the tours at the castles being like, even though he was so cocky and so so full of himself when he was back there, now all he wants to do is be back there.
Grethcen:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of fits that one of the first things he does in the book with the narrator sees him and he's like, Oh yeah, I saw that man get shot and I shot him.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's kind of like very fitting that the first thing he does is kind of bring up something that he did and he was proud of.
JM:
Yeah, it's really funny, but it's also like you expect that guy to be still on top of everything.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He peaked.
JM:
Like you expect him to be like this figure who goes on to fight another day because like he's the solid spirit of the day and yet he can't because he's gone into this romantic past and now he can't come out.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
He gets caught up in his own mythology, in a way.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. He's caught up in this like romanticized past. It's like he can't embrace the present anymore. He has to relive when he thought he was on top, when he thought he had power and had prestige, and now he doesn't have that anymore.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we got sucked into it too. Like, you know, there was something about it that was likable. And I mean, I guess a lot of it was like, we never got to see Hank in his element as much as we might like. But when it was, it was kind of idyllic. And it's just kind of interesting because like I was saying earlier, Sandy is kind of a ridiculous figure. She's kind of a little bit pathetic and like kind of get embarrassed by the whole thing with the pigs and everything. But at the end of the day, she's his comfort still, and he thinks about her and he wants to be near her at the last. And that's what he remembers. It's kind of touching. Despite everything, Twain just has to give us that. You know, he can't be completely cynical about everything as much as he might want to be.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting in that final third, she has a really tender and caring side that comes out of nowhere. Like she ceases to be a chatterbox that is just blathering her way through Malory. But she is maybe like the most like kind-hearted character in the whole novel in a way.
JM:
Yeah, well, I mean, when it comes to it, she wanted to pair herself with a proud noble person. And even though he may not be nobility, I guess she found that in him. That was good enough for her. And now she's a mother. So it's kind of like, you know, she's fallen into the domestic role. But that's kind of her thing, right? Seems like that was a thing too. Twain writing women like that was fairly common. Like they were a little bit ornamental. He even made a speech along those lines, possibly sort of lampooning himself a little bit and talking about ornamental women and how a woman can be, you know, how he married into a higher social status because he thought that it would be good for him. Not to say that it was loveless. I think it sounds like it was perhaps more loving than his own parents' marriage. But he wanted the comfort. I mean, he was happy to take her with him on a few of his trips and stuff, but that is Mark Twain. But he had an image to uphold and a family to maintain. And I think that became very important to him, again, starting around this time where he's realizing that he is getting older and thinking a lot about his mortality. And as tragedies continue to happen in the family, I think that even became more paramount to him.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But it's really interesting the feelings that it engenders because it does lampoon a lot of things, both from the past and the present. And it's really great, over 100, almost 150 years hence from the time when the book was written to actually think about how we might respond differently to it. Now, having Twain was very influenced at the time by the workers' movements, I think it's kind of all over, you know, lots of talk about labor, lots of talk about, like, even from the beginning, because the boss, Hank, gets into all this from the start because he gets attacked by one of the workers, like, you know, he's a foreman in a factory.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I guess he probably would say he does his best for everyone and tries to be fair, but apparently somebody wasn't very happy with him that day. And he was obviously very influenced by that, but we've had so much more experience of extreme capitalism since then. We think a little differently than people from 1889, I think. And it might be easier to see those satires now than it was then, the reviewers not commenting on it. You know, it's very telling, I guess. It seems to be, I don't know.
Nate:
this is like the age of the robber baron and the age of the really dangerous factories and 16-hour work days. And I think the horrors of industrial capitalism would be even more apparent to the average person in the late 1800s.
JM:
I guess so.
Nate:
There's almost no worker protection, the work is super dangerous, you know, you get your arm ripped off at work, you don't get shit, you know, you can't work for the rest of your life, and that's it.
JM:
I'm guessing those people didn't have time to read.
Nate:
No, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, London particularly was notoriously bad for awful living conditions for its factory workers.
JM:
Yeah, Dickens has wrote about that, right?
Nate:
Oh yeah, many times, yeah.
JM:
Dickens was one of Mark Twain's favorite writers, so that makes sense too.
Nate:
Yeah, but I mean, it's just interesting how much things change and how little they change at the same time. A lot of this is still very relevant in the present day.
JM:
Yeah, definitely.
I wanted to mention briefly the adaptations. So there is an adaptation from 1931 starring Will Rogers in the Hank Martin role. I did not really watch that, I watched a few minutes of it, I didn't really, I don't know, I wasn't really in the mood for it. The 1949 one with Bing Crosby was bad enough. The Will Rogers one, I guess there's some interesting things to comment on, and I wonder if they have to do with the things that were around at the time. Like, those movies are not really remembered now, but the thing is they both contained big stars of their day who were like very important, and they were not like underground movies by any stretch. So, I mean, in a way, even though they're just a footnote in the Mark Twain "Connecticut Yankee" legacy, it might be worth mentioning because what I thought was interesting, so the Will Rogers one from 31, right? It's the beginning of the Great Depression. Things are not that great in America at that time. Interestingly and notably, that film takes place during that, like it starts during that time. Sir Boss, played by Will Rogers, is a person from 1931, and he's a radio personality. He's basically Will Rogers, who's like this big radio personality, starting to be a visual actor, like he was all over the place at that time. He was really popular, and he's not only a radio DJ in the film, but also like a guy who really knows radios or something, and he goes to fix something, and then something happens to him, and that's how he gets knocked back into the past. And I thought it was interesting because the 1949 one, the one with Bing Crosby, that film came out after the Second World War, unlike the pre-code version. And the interesting thing about that one is the main character in that film is from the past. He's from 1912, so he's actually from the next generation after Mark Twain's Hank Morgan would be.
Nate:
Yeah, weird.
JM:
And I think the reason they did that was because that was such an awesome time, right, in American history and development. They want to bring you back to that time. In that movie, Bing Crosby is a blacksmith, and it starts out, I don't think he works for a factory or anything. It seems like he's just doing his own thing, but everybody in the neighborhood likes him because he's Bing Crosby, I guess, and he's just cool. So they all hang out and sing a song about how great it is to make gadgets and how awesome everything is. And then there's a storm, and he gets knocked out, and he gets sent to the past. But I thought it was interesting that the later film had the main character from an earlier time than the earlier film did. It's almost like they were trying to send a message there a little bit, I think, and sort of even bring back the romantic past of America a little bit and say, Hey, remember the early 1900s? Remember the industrious men from those great times?
Nate:
Right, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, that movie, again, like, we talked about adaptations during "Kindred". It was kind of a big deal because it was new. This is from 1949. It's already a relic, so I don't really want to, like, complain about it all night. But yeah, it wasn't very good. The changes were really bizarre. They had, like, Sir Boss opened up a blacksmith's shop in Camelot, I guess, and, like, Morgan Lefay and Merlin kidnapped him and the king, and so they were sold into slavery to them. And the eclipse happened at the end, and it was like the big miracle that the last big effect of Sir Boss was the eclipse. The earlier thing he just had, like, he reflected the sun off his watch and set fire to Merlin's robe somehow, so it was like, Oh, no, you know, now you should be knighted. Lancelot and Sandy were betrothed, but Sir Boss was, like, realized that Sandy didn't love Lancelot, and I don't know, it was just, it was really weird because at the end, too, it turns out that, like, the Lord Pendragon, who's the lord of this castle, where he sees all the tour thing at the beginning, like, he turns out to be, he's had Sandy with him all this time, and Sandy's his actual niece, and at the end of the film, Hank gets Sandy back, because Sandy's in fact around now, and she's the niece of the current lord of the castle, and she tells him by winking at him, which is the thing that Bing Crosby told her how to do, back in the day when they were going wandering, he showed her how to wink, and sing, and sing the swing, and yeah, it was really cheesy. Apparently, the Will Rogers version makes even less sense, like, at the end, they have the knights storming Morgan Lefay's castle to rescue Arthur and Boss with, like, machine guns and everything, and yeah, it's a whole lot of nonsense, basically. In the 1949 film, there's, like, eight or nine musical interludes, and they're all, like, really boring, slow swing songs.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I like old films as much as anybody, like, more than most people, maybe, but I mean, I'll take Frank Sinatra over Bing Crosby any day. Yeah, it was really bad, so I don't recommend it, but it was just kind of interesting to see, because, like, yeah, there were adaptations made pretty early on of this, and from what I can tell, all of them play on the comedy aspect, but they really underdo the pathos, like, they underdo the emotional power of the book, and they really seem to, like, especially the 1949 one, just sort of thrive on this, like, yeah, America is great, isn't it, you know, kind of thing.
Nate:
Well, maybe we're overdue for a dark and gritty reboot where every character says the F word every other line, and there's, like, nudity in every episode and all that.
JM:
Yeah, probably. That could happen. I don't know, I'm not necessarily asking for that.
but we forgot to mention the New Deal. Do you remember where that came up? We should mention it. It's in one of the mid chapters, I think, and Sir Boss talks about there being a New Deal, and this is apparently where Franklin Roosevelt got the New Deal phrase from.
Nate:
Oh, I didn't realize it was ever this came from, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, hang on a sec.
Gretchen:
I had forgotten about that.
JM:
Yeah, during one of the things that Sir Boss said, he actually mentioned, he's like, and this is the New Deal, and then he started to describe it. Apparently, that is the first instance of that particular phrase. And so, when we hear about Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, apparently, this is what he got it from.
Nate:
Yeah, that's pretty cool. I didn't realize that. Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. I think the Disney adaptation was probably pretty silly, and apparently there's a 1989 TV movie of some kind that I don't know anything about. So I think it seems apparent that the real strong adaptation of this, it really takes into account the darkness and the pathos that Twain puts into it has yet to be made. Whether it could go too easily, too far into, like, ultra gritty territory for no reason, I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, it just seems strange that, like, it seems like such an obvious source for an adaptation, but nobody's really done it, like, the way it was written, at all.
Nate:
No. No. And I guess it'd be difficult to do before this modern era of prestige TV where you have, like, I don't know, a good five or six different episodes that all really...
JM:
But I don't know. I don't know, though. I don't know if that adding length to it is the answer. Like, I don't think that's what's needed. I mean, I don't necessarily think it needs to be longer than the 1949 movie. I just think, like, you could tell the story. You'd have to condense a few things here in the era, but you could make a pretty awesome version of it that's not ridiculous.
Nate:
Yeah, that's true.
JM:
And not, like, blatantly for kids where the baseball's the most important thing or whatever, right? But, yeah. So final thoughts on the book?
Nate:
It's great.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I loved it when I first read it and I love it now.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I really enjoy it. This is the first time I've ever read it. And I'm glad I did. I did really enjoy it. It was very funny, but it also does have that pathos, though, and it's... There's a lot more underneath just the comedy of it that is interesting to look at.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely think so, too. I definitely think, like, it worked on so many different levels, which was the great thing about it, which is one of the reasons why reading it five times since being a five-year-old or whatever has been pretty great.
So one possibly final question. How do you guys think this book fits into science fiction?
Gretchen:
I think that it's similar in a way to "Kindred" when we were talking about it last month, where there isn't perhaps a scientific explanation for the time travel that occurs in this book, but I think that it still falls under that genre and kind of has an influence on the tropes that we later see with time travel and, like, wanting to perhaps correct the past or alter it in some way that we see in some time travel media.
Nate:
Yeah, in addition to the time travel stuff, I think it's also important to note that Hank is pretty much an electrical engineer. He builds all these cool electrical devices which suit his exact needs at the time, which is, you know, zapping 30,000 knights to death, but he does it in a really wild, unprecedented way that very much fits in with some of the science fiction characters we'll see in later works.
JM:
Yeah, I think it's really interesting that, like, he takes a moment to pause for several paragraphs to talk about the ground connection. You know, it's like, who would do that but a weird sci-fi writer?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know, like, I know Mark Twain's not quite that, but, like, still, despite whatever he might have thought about Jules Verne and disrespected him, it seems like he was in on the game as well.
Nate:
Oh, yeah, I mean, he hung out with Nikola Tesla, so he obviously thought this stuff was pretty cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah, some cool pictures, too.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
So how I really think this fits into science fiction, besides what you guys mentioned and the time travel aspect is definitely, you know, obviously a really early example of that. I saw this called the first American science fiction novel, and I don't really necessarily think I can argue with that. Is the person, like, they sort of, I guess, putting oneself over on an alien culture and essentially something that, like, maybe any imperialist would be familiar with in general, but which has also applied a lot to science fiction because then, not too long before Twain wrote this, there was that big speech talking about how the frontier had closed in America and stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah, the Jackson Turner thesis.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. So right after that, you got like, oh, what about the other frontiers? What about the sea? What about space, right? What about, what if we need more frontiers? We need, we can't have this be the end, right? And so, Twain is like, yeah, here's a frontier. The past. It's a new frontier, and it's like the old frontier made new. And here we are with an industrious man, a new man of the new age, ready to impose his will and his character and his personality and his goddamn performative expertise on everything, on all the people, on all the institutions, on the nation, on the kingdom, and do it with power and might. And he does it with all the gusto of any of our 1860s, 1870s Edisonades and then some. And in the end, it doesn't really do him good. And it ends in tragedy because Mark Twain was able to see the realistic end to that kind of vice. And I don't know, avarice really, like just, I mean, Sir Boss doesn't really seem greedy, but like a lot of the things that Mark Twain was writing about at that time and was interested in and kind of like the revelation of the fact that, hey, when the Civil War ended and you guys up there up in the North, you guys won the Civil War, but that didn't mean it was the end of corruption. That didn't mean it was the end of misery for black people. That didn't mean that everything was great all of a sudden. And I think that became something that was more and more brought home to him as time went on. In the 1870s, late 1870s, he returned to the Mississippi and found it to be much changed from his boyhood. And of course, you would expect that, right? You've been away for a long time. You're not the same person as you were back then. And the country is not the same. And he came back seemingly with a desire to recapture his boyhood and instead found something a little bit negative and unlikeable. And I think that is one of the things that sort of instigated his pessimistic streak, which really started in the 1880s. And I think even "Huck Finn", like by the time he was a little bit older, he was saying "Huckleberry Finn" was a romance, and that it was like wishful thinking and it was kind of a dream, right? And it's like, yeah, even that book, which does revive, like does kind of show you a lot of the ugliness of slavery and has Huckleberry Finn basically saying, I'll go to hell for this man, right? He says that and he says it in good conscious. But at the same time, he still thinks that he's doing the wrong thing. And Huckleberry Finn is like the good boy that did not prosper, whereas Tom Sawyer is the bad boy that never came to grief. And those are two early sketches that Twain wrote in the 1860s. And that's the kind of thing that seems to have stuck with him forever. And realizing that the bad boy doesn't come to grief and that the good one, in fact, suffers for his positive ways and for his things that meant something to him. And I think that in transplanting this to an otherworldly setting, basically a setting of the past that's like another world, basically, he's allowing himself to comment on so much of his own society, I think, just as much as the British. And the fact that he maybe got so many negative reviews proves that he was right, like in so many negative reviews from the British saying, "You shouldn't lampoon Malory, how dare you!" Maybe he had a point, maybe he was right, but I don't know. In 2023, it's kind of hard to see the nobility as being like that strong of a target. Like it's just whatever now, people don't really take it that seriously.
Nate:
I mean, they pretty much are a royal family of cats.
JM:
Yeah. He had his easier targets, like maybe the nobility wasn't that easy, but let's say the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, now, when I read this, when I was 12, which was I think the second time, I guess, I thought it was pretty ballsy of him to go against the Catholic Church like that. And I thought it was pretty great. But realizing that, in fact, most of his audience, especially the subscription audience at the time, would have been 100% in favor of everything that he said and did. You know, like they didn't like the Catholic Church. There was anti-Catholic sentiment in America at the time.
Nate:
Oh, it was a big deal when JFK ran for president, like in the 1960s.
JM:
Yeah. So it carried on, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And Twain was really just touting the party line with that. There was nothing special about it. No. I mean, like in retrospect, now I have to admit, like, yeah, I mean, his attacks on the church, it feels in the sixth century, okay, maybe I can see that it has, I mean, it's just as bad as he says it is. And under the 1900s, maybe a lot of it was too, but it just feels like not as strong a target as I might have thought previously.
Gretchen:
Right.
JM:
But at the same time, it's like, yeah, he is speaking for the labor movements, and he has a lot of impassioned speeches. And it's weird because like, yeah, Hank is not perfect, right? Like Hank is the foreman. He maybe isn't necessarily loved by all his workers, right? So maybe he is the boss in a way, a representative of the boss in his own time.
Nate:
Yeah, I would definitely say so. And I think he adopts that title with both pride and wanting. He seems to be a very early proponent of scientific management, you know, this theory of making the workplace the most efficient method of productivity as possible. You know, we got to streamline everything and maximize profit, that kind of attitude. At the cost of making your workers feel perhaps less than human. But at the same time, he frees them, or I guess frees his workers from a system of medieval feudalism, which he directly links with slavery.
JM:
Yeah, he is very pro education, which is good.
Nate:
Yeah, he is. I mean, it's a very complicated issue he brings up here. I mean, the system he brings on pretty much brings them their death. It seals their doom, because they overdo it a bit. I mean, they just take it too far.
JM:
Yeah, so this is a hell of a book. Definitely, definitely really nice to see a writer like Mark Twain entering our field here and doing kind of something that we can definitely, and without any hesitation of conscience, cover on the Chrononauts podcast.
So I think we're going to continue this theme for a while. And next time on the Chrononauts podcast, we'll be covering a few other time travel into the past stories with some different perspectives, a couple of which would maybe be a direct response to what we've just read. One is L. Sprague de Camp's novel, not "Elsephrag Decop", which is a really awesome name that should be in a book somewhere. Apparently that's what the transcript made of his name.
Nate:
Yeah, the AI transcriber we've been using has some rather creative interpretations of people's names.
JM:
But L. Sprague de Camp's novel, "Lest Darkness Fall", which was originally in short story form in the December 1939 issue of Unknown. We'll briefly talk about Unknown when we do the episode, but it was the sister magazine to Astounding Science Fiction, and it was not, strictly speaking, a science fiction magazine. It was basically a fantasy sci-fi kind of crossover with kind of general appeal. And it's a really interesting magazine. A lot of great stuff was published there, but it was kind of short-lived, unfortunately. This story was expanded into a novel in 1941 and published in that form, which means that De Camp was somewhat ahead of many of his peers in terms of getting an actual novel published. And we will be doing the longer version. We also have "The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson. This story was originally found in the June 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Finally, we have, from the September 1946 issue of Astounding, "Vintage Season" by C. L. Moore, operating under the pseudonym Lawrence O'Donnell. This story, I'm really looking forward to doing. It's a favorite of mine and one that I think we're all going to really enjoy talking about. So all these stories should be relatively easy to find. We definitely suggest that you read them and enjoy them, if you can, and tune into the episode. So we're going forward into the pulp era at this point of the 20th century in the science fiction magazines, which we've already covered a little bit previously, but not much. And yeah, I think these will be really interesting follow-ups to what we've just talked about. And I'm looking forward to discussing them.
Gretchen:
Yes, looking forward especially to "Vintage Season". That's a really great story.
Nate:
Yeah, I've heard it's great, but it should be a fun episode.
JM:
Yeah, I think that everybody's going to enjoy it and anybody listening to the podcast should definitely read it. It is a classic. I haven't read the Anderson, but I've read some of his other stuff before and I like him quite a bit. So I'm looking forward to that one as well. De Camp is pretty cool. Definitely an interesting writer who enjoyed writing about time travel stuff. I tend to like his stuff as well. So even though he did things that were not always beloved by fans of sword and sorcery, like taking Robert E. Howard Conan drafts and expanding them into stories and writing other Conan stories to fit into the Conan universe that not everybody apparently likes, I haven't read any of that stuff. I've just read his science fiction and I like what it read. So, yeah.
But, hello? Hello, Central? Hello, Central? Ah, damn, newfangled technology! Well, damn it. I guess maybe they'll perfect the telephone one of these days. Maybe next time on Chrononauts we'll have a working telephone. Tune in then. We have been and will always be Chrononauts.
(Music: Chrononauts Theme)
Bibliography:
Canavan, Gerry (ed.) - "The Cambridge History of Science Fiction" (2019)
Great Courses: King Arthur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDfHlZ3_LSY&list=PL0IAN1A2ENLxjsGLproWiknUfRq1fU22W
Loving, Jerome - "Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens" (2010)
Malory, Sir Thomas - "Le Morte D'Arthur" (original uncorrected text) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/MaloryWks2/1:4?rgn=div1;view=toc
Powers, Rot - "Mark Twain: A Life" (2005)
Scharnhorst, Gary - "The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891" (2019)
Twain, Mark - "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" original 1889 printing https://archive.org/details/connecticutyanke1889twai
Music:
Webster, Joseph P. - "In the Sweet By-and-By" (1868) http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/i/n/t/s/intsbab.htm
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