A Little Background, Part 2: French Lessons

       It turns out that Twain studied French when he was young—and not in school or because his mother made him but by choice.   According to Paine, when Sam Clemens learned about Joan of Arc, he was also taken with a desire to learn not only history but another language.  As Paine puts it, starting out with a dubious claim, “He seemed likely to become a student.  Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and German.”   Paine then tells a funny story about Sam’s first attempt to learn a second language that sounds as if it came straight from Twain’s mouth (which it probably did).

     In those days, Hannibal wasn’t the sort of place with a language school, so Sam and a friend came up with a plan. There was no one to teach them French but there was a local German shoemaker they thought might be willing to teach them his native language.  He agreed, but his English was so bad it led to confusion. Here I’ll pick up the story from Paine (or should I say Twain?)

Their teacher had some sort of “word-book,” and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence:

“De hein eet flee whoop in de hayer.”

“Dere,” he said, triumphantly; “you know dose vord?”

The students looked at each other helplessly.

The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he asked if they recognized it.

Then in despair he showed them the book.  It was an English primer, and the sentence was, “The hen, it flies up into the air.”

They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn, not English—not under the circumstances.

     Sam then tried to teach himself Latin from a book, coming to the conclusion that “that language is not for me.  I’ll do well enough to learn English.”

Sam Clemens as a young printer's apprentice

     
     But he had better success about ten years later—and this time it was with French.   Clemens had given up printing--though he was good at it and fast--to follow his dream of becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, which he was not only good at but loved. [Link to audio file of opening chapters of Life on the Mississippi]  By then, he was going about in patent leather shoes, fancy striped shirts, and blue serge suits, and sporting a mutton-chop beard.  Once again, he decided that learning another language would add to his cachet.

     On his travels, he came across a language school offering a deal on French, German, and Italian lessons: $25 for one language or 3 for $50.  Sam, of course, went for all three.  The student got a set of cards for each language and was supposed to walk through a succession of three rooms, changing languages as he went.  After a couple of frustrating trips, Sam decided just to do French, then quit altogether.  But when he did, he took his French cards with him—and evidently hit the books pretty hard for some time.

     “He must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port,” Paine writes, “for his river note-book contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the Dialogues of Voltaire”—not exactly an elementary primer of the sort the shoemaker had used.

     That river journal is from 1860-1861, when the young man who would soon become Mark Twain was about 25. 

A Little Background, Part I: Joan of Arc

The portico entrance to Quarry Farm

     Twain didn't start out as a France-basher.  For starters, the young Sam Clemens fell in love with Joan of Arc.  I read about his infatuation during a snow-bound January at Quarry Farm, Twain's summer home in Elmira, New York. It still sits on a hill overlooking  the Chemung Valley, about two hours south of  Syracuse.  Although the area has long been in decline, the view from the house's portico remains sweeping and inspiring.  Here, Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and much of his other best work in an octagonal study his sister-in-law Sue Crane--the actual owner of the house--had built for him in the woods nearby. He'd get up--at what he called the crack of 11--eat breakfast in a sunny kitchen, then head up a path to the study through a small door in the kitchen wall. 
     Quarry Farm has become hallowed ground for the  unconventional bunch of academics informally known as  Twainiacs.  I also like to count myself among them, and I was lucky enough stay there as a visiting scholar.  There's an intimidating library on the ground floor that still holds many books owned by Twain's family, and makes an embarrassing reminder of how much and how widely people read in those days. (Books that Twain read and annotated, along with his famous study, have been moved down the hill to the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.)  In a small sitting room upstairs there's another collection, of books about Twain's work, life, and family.  There I discovered that Twain took an interest in France before he actually went there.
    Twain's first biographer was a man named Albert Bigelow Paine, notorious in Twainiac circles for being literally too close to his subject.  In his last years, Twain took to dictating his version of his life to Paine while lying in an elaborately carved bed he and his late wife Livy had imported from Europe long before.  Anybody who's read even a paragraph of Twain can guess what's wrong with this scenario. Twain was not always inclined toward facts and Paine was always inclined toward kissing-up.  So it can be hard to tell truth from tall tale or sycophantry in the three-volume work that came out two years after Twain's death with the grand title: Mark Twain, A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens.  
     Even so, Paine's "biography" is a mother lode for Twainiacs.  Even if Twain made things up and Paine exaggerated them, it still shows what Twain had on his mind in his last decade.  And veins of truth run throughout, including, I think, through a fanciful passage about Sam and Joan.  It describes the moment he first fell for her, an infatuation that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
     As Paine tells it, young Sam suffered his coup de foudre on the street in Hanibal, Missouri, when he was about 13.  His father has died, and he's gone to work as work as a printer's apprentice.  Sam happens across a page from a book about Joan as it is blowing  down the sidewalk.  It describes her "in the cage at Rouen, in the fortress, and two ruffian soldiers had stolen her clothes."  Our hero is a goner.  As Paine put its, Sam: 
     had never read any history…Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for   
     the  gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment for her captors, a powerful and indestructible
     interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a
     lifetime and culminate in that crowning work, Personal Recollections…”
    Paine calls this moment a "turning point" in Twain's life.  In full dramatic mode, he writes that "the incident…meant the awakening of his interest in all history—the world’s story in its many phases—a passion which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained with him till his very last day on earth." 
     So Twain fell for Joan across a sea of time, place, and--French-- culture. According to Paine, he “read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French Wars, and to Joan in particular.” 
     Setting aside any fanciful parts of this story, Twain did  develop somewhat of an obsession with Joan and went on to spend 12 years studying her life for his book, which today is little read (and for good reason). 
     The point I want to make, though, is that he, our most "American" of writers, first imagined a real world beyond America’s borders through a fascination with an iconic figure of French history.

The keep of Rouen Castle, now known as the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, where she is said to have been shown instruments of torture and resisted.  About an hour-and-and-half northwest of Paris, Rouen also lies on the Seine and was a large, thriving city in medieval Europe.  In 1431, Joan was executed there; today it is the capital of Haute Normandie.

Francophile Compatriots--and a Bad Hotel Review

     For a lively read about Americans who flocked to Paris in Twain's time, take a look at David McCullough's 2011 account, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.  It covers the love affair with the city of nineteenth-century Americans including James Fenimore Cooper,  Samuel Morse, Mary Cassatt, and Augustus Saint-Gauden.  
     Around the time the book was published, I saw McCullough giving an interview on American TV.  With his usual charm and eloquence, he noted the role of the French in the founding of our country, especially of Rochambeau's army at Yorktown, which he called greater than Washington's. Then he said something that made me run for the nearest pen and piece of scratch paper.  I was repeating his words aloud as I went so as not to forget them, so I hope I caught them properly.  Regardless, I think I captured the spirit of his remarks.  Here they are as I scribbled them down:
     "The French connection is much greater than we realize...History is much more than just armies and politicians. To me, Mark Twain, Willa Cather [and other writers whose names I did not get down] are as important to who we are as anyone else--and that should be included [in historical accounts]."
     I think he's right on both counts: the French role is often undervalued in the American portfolio, as our stock brokers would have it, and history is driven by culture not just events. Yet McCullough doesn't comment on the discrepancy when it comes to Twain and the French.  Yes, the French played an important part in American history, and so in his way did Twain--but don't expect the latter to have hailed the former!
     A few months ago, by coincidence, I met McCullough at a college writing conference at Dartmouth College, where he was giving a brief talk about writing history.  Afterwards, I went up and shook his hand and told him about my Fulbright project on Twain and France.  He immediately directed me--without needing to  recall or refer to anything--to the hotel where Twain had stayed on his first trip to Paris: "You must go to the Grand Hotel du Louvre!"     
     I said I'd be here for six months and would be renting an apartment for myself and my family.
     "Well, just go for a night anyway," he suggested.  
     I took McCullough's word for it, of course (he being the eminent historian), but just to double check, I looked up in The Innocents Abroad where Twain and the other American tourists aboard The Quaker City in Paris.  There it is, at the end of Chapter 12, in a passage that begins auspiciously but soon devolves into a complaint.  Shades of Francophobia to come:

     To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our sumptuous bed to read and smoke--but alas!

                          It was pitiful

                          In a whole city-full,

                          Gas we had none.

     No gas to read by--nothing but dismal candles.  It was a shame.  We tried to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides to Paris"; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of the wild chaos of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched--then feebly wondered if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away into that vast mysterious void that men call sleep.

     Maybe that unhappy review still accounts, some century and a half later, for the fact that the hotel fails to mention Twain in its own story of its history.  Freud, yes.  Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, yes.  Camille Pissarro, yes.  But no marking of Twain in the description on its website of "a true Parisian hotel."
    Still, one of these nights I think I'll try to take McCullough's advice and spring for a room there--then see if the management has any record of Twain's complaint.

For the first few months of 1898, Camille Pissarro lived at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, where he created a number of paintings, including this one, of views from his window.  Today, that room,  known as the "Pissarro suite" goes for about $1,800 a night.

 
     

     

What the French Think of Twain: Take 1

"Twain?  Shania?"
                 --Chehla, HSBC Passy branch

So, if Twain hated the French, what do they make of him? Ca depend, as they say here.  It depends--on who you ask and what their place is in French society.  Many people, perhaps even most of a certain generation and background, will recognize his name and those of his two most famous characters.  Huck et Tom?, they'll respond with a smile.  Others, not so much.
But before you start to get huffy about the idea of a "place" in society--so defensively Americain--let me point out that things aren't so different in the U.S.  Take the recent hit, Les Miserables, in all its reiterated, cash-cow glory.  Some people know only the blockbuster movie version now out in such wide release that you can catch it, in English with French subtitles, in theaters throughout Paris, including one in my own neighborhood.  Setting aside the irony and absurdity of such a cultural moment--a Hollywood hit of a Broadway musical of a French classic playing en englais avec sous-titres en francais--the people familiar with the movie surely comprise a bigger group than those who've seen Les Mis. on stage.  Still fewer--and here the number must really dwindle--will know that it was originally a great, and hugely successful, 19th-century French novel.  And if you asked the average American--whoever that "mythical beast" might be, to use James Thurber's immortal words about the unicorn--who Victor Hugo was, well, you'd be likely to get a blank stare, until you added, Les Miserables.  The same, I suspect, is true about Twain for most of the French: Huck and Tom might draw a grin of recognition.  But Twain himself?  Not necessarily.  (By the way, he could certainly have told you who Victor Hugo was.  In letters he and his future wife Livy wrote during their courtship, they passionately discuss Hugo and other internationally known writers and artists of their day.  Ah, the pleasures of nineteenth-century sublimation!)
But I'm getting off topic, as Twain himself used to do.  What happened when I asked my first real live French person who Twain was?  I was reminded yet again that we all live in cultural bubbles of our own making.
It happened in the seizieme, or the sixteenth arrondissement, a neighborhood at the western edge of Paris known for its well-heeled residents, embassies, museums, and mansions.  The offices of the Fulbright and Franco-American Commission are also there, on a side street one block up from the river with a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower when you turn the corner.  Up a long, stone flight of double stairs and down another fashionable street is the Passy branch of the HSBC bank, with which Fulbight has an arrangement for accounts for visiting scholars and students.
My first day in Paris, I headed all the way across town to open my bank account.  My apartment is on the border of the 11th and 20th arrondissements, on the eastern side of the city, in what the guide books and tourist websites describe as the old revolutionary, working class part of town.  Because it was my first day, it was snowing, and I was not only jet-lagged but getting a flu, I sprang for a taxi to make sure I got to my bank appointment a l'heure.  The cab ride was like being in a flip-book as I moved from one neighborhood of Paris to another, ascending the social ladder as I went.  At the HSBC Passy branch, I was met by a well-spoken--in French and English--woman named Chehla, who reminded me of a young Brooke Shields.  We chatted as we filled out endless forms; she told me was French of Algerian descent, recently married and the mother of an infant son.  We talked, too, about Woody Allen and how much the French love his movies.  I asked her if she'd seen Take the Money and Run and, when she said she hadn't, I told her about the scene where his character, Virgil no less, tries to rob a bank but instead gets into an argument about handwriting.  He shoves a note across to a teller, who looks at it quizzically.
"I'm pointing a gub at you?" the teller inquires.
Woody defends his handwriting with trademark neurosis.
No, no, gun. Gun.  See? That's an n, not a b, an n. 
But nothing doing.  The scene ends with a crowd of bank employees bickering over Virgil's note.  "Abt natural?"  "Gub?"
Even when he pulls back his jacket to reveal the real thing, he gets  an officious snub. 
"You'll have to have this note initialed," the teller tells him.
So, gub it is (and gub it shall for me forever remain.)
 [If you haven't seen the movie, it's worth watching--repeatedly.  I myself could start every day with it, that is if I had more time to squander than I already do. Clip ]
But back to Chehla.  Since she and I were already laughing together about Woody Allen, I took the opportunity to ask her about Twain, who was, to say the least, another famous American humorist.  
"Connaissez-vouz Mark Twain?" I said.
"Qui?" she replied.
"Mark Twain."
She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"Non."
"Huckleberry Finn?"
Another pause, then another, "Non."
She thought for a moment, clearly wanting sincerely to be helpful.  
Then she said with a hopeful smile, "Twain--Shania?"
It was my turn to shake my head.
I told her Shania was a singer not a writer and asked what American writers she did know.  Melville?
Non.
Poe?
Non.
Faulkner?  Fitzgerald? Morrison?
Non, non, non.
But, she explained, she hadn't studied literature, only economics.
I thought some more and gave it one last try.
"Hemingway?"
Her face brightened.  
Oui! Hemingway.
Like I said, the biggest shoes to fill.  

Speaking of Wilde and Paris ...

For more on Oscar Wilde's permanent relationship to France--that is, his grave  in Paris--see this New York Times story about his overly enthusiastic admirers. 
Wilde's large and lovely tombstone is one of the most popular in this city's famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, within walking distance of my own apartment here.

The Anxiety of the Biographically Inclined

For those of us prone to neurosis—whom I assume to be anyone reading this blog—writing about someone else’s life is, I now see, a particular worry.  Especially when you’re writing about the life of a dead person who can’t refute what you say.  Last night, I woke up in the pre-dawn Paris darkness, fretting about my word choice.  Did Twain really hate the French?  Or is that going too far in describing his attitude?  Is it unfair to him to say so?  Am I, as usual, being hyperbolic for effect?

But then I thought, it’s Twain, for God’s sake! The guy who devoted his own writing life to being irreverent about everyone and everything, including—and maybe even especially—himself.  Fairness, be damned!  Twain always went for equal parts veracity and humor: telling the truth in a way that made people laugh. 

Then after that I thought, just look at what Twain did have to say about the French.  There’s no denying his antipathy—okay, his hatred—there.  True, some of his most scurrilous remarks appear in his letters and journals, as if he doesn’t really want to go public with them, but his bias also shows up in his work. 

Here’s a sampling of his most hateful comments about the French:

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

France has usually been governed by prostitutes. 

A Frenchman's home is where another man's wife is.

In certain public indecencies the difference between a dog & a Frenchman is not perceptible.

It appears that at last census every man in France over 16 years of age & under 116, has at least 1 wife to whom he has never been married.

French novels, talk, drama & newspapers bring daily & overwhelming proofs that most of the married ladies have paramours. This makes a good deal of what we call crime, and the French call sociability. 

Trivial Americans go to Paris when they die. 

(This is perhaps a take-off on a remark by Oscar Wilde:  “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”  The dates are hard to pin down, but Twain did meet Wilde in Germany in 1893, as described in letters by both his daughters Susy and Clara.)

An isolated & helpless young girl is perfectly safe from insult by a Frenchman, if he is dead.

And my two personal favorites when it comes to showing that Twain’s views on the French are too consistent and extreme to do anything but take them seriously:

A dead Frenchman has many good qualities.

French are the connecting link between man & the monkey.

‘Nuff said.