Word: twains
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...MARK TWAIN, AN AMERICAN PROPHET by Maxwell Geismar. 564 pages. Houghfon Mifflin...
This latest critical appreciation of Mark Twain is not without blemish, being sloppy, narrow, quarrelsome, doctrinaire, vague, repetitive and ungrammatical. But it has its virtues too. The best of these is that Writer Geismar loves Mark Twain and quotes him joyously on almost every page. Sometimes he likes a passage so much that he quotes it twice, but Twain can stand that...
...second virtue is that a reader with patience enough to mush through the swampy parts of Geismar's argument will find modest patches of solid ground. The author is right in stating that Twain is too little known and understood as a critic of U.S. society, and that the harshly satirical writing of his later years, despite recent notice, is still widely unread. Mainly in the past decade, critics have been pointing out the same thing. But for most fond readers, Twain remains a humorist and pastoral novelist...
Geismar gives no coherent explanation of how the popular view of Twain came to be so unbalanced. Instead, he feuds shrilly with Justin Kaplan, author of the excellent 1966 biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, and with a succession of editors of Twain's posthumously printed Autobiography. Kaplan's supposed offenses are hardshell Freudianism (Geismar is an adherent of Freud's dissident disciple, Otto Rank, whom he peddles as if Rank were a mutual fund), and undue susceptibility to influence by the CIA. It is Geismar's fantasy that "cold war critics," including Kaplan and Charles...
Kipling's unmeetable twain have been getting together with a vengeance in Bangkok. The American presence meant money and automobiles; automobiles meant roads. So the exotic "Venice of the East" filled in most of its famed canals and turned itself into a miniature Oriental Los Angelescomplete with fume-spewing, bumper-to-bumper thrombosis. To the rescue last week, during a two-day official visit to Bangkok, came U.S. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. His prescription, typical of the inscrutable West: fill in the few remaining canals and add express buses...