"Bon-Bon" (1835) is a comic tale, extensively revised, which was first published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (December, 1832) as "The Bargain "Bon-Bon" (1835) is a comic tale, extensively revised, which was first published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (December, 1832) as "The Bargain Lost." Whereas the original was merely a brief anecdote concerning the devil and a drunken Italian philosopher, the revised version features a French philosopher instead, one who is also a cook. Since human souls are food for the devil, the change brings with it a few ironies.
I’ve never been particularly fond of Poe’s humorous pieces. I think he usually tries way too hard. But I have to admit this is one of his better comic efforts, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I’ll end with the following monologue of Monsieur the Devil, who discusses the preservation of souls (not for salvation, of course, but for eating), and the advantages of taking possession of the human soul—and consuming it—prior to death, a process which—his Lordship claims—entails no inconvenience to the living whatsoever:
Why we are sometimes exceedingly pushed for provisions. You must know that, in a climate so sultry as mine, it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours; and after death, unless pickled immediately, (and a pickled spirit is not good,) they will — smell — you understand, eh? Putrefaction is always to be apprehended when the souls are consigned to its in the usual way … there are several ways of managing. The most of us starve: some put up with the pickle: for my part I purchase my spirits vivente corpore, in which case I find they keep very well … Why, sir, the body is not at all affected by the transaction. I have made innumerable purchases of the kind in my day, and the parties never experienced any inconvenience. There were Cain and Nimrod, and Nero, and Caligula, and Dionysius, and Pisistratus,(29) and — and a thousand others, who never knew what it was to have a soul during the latter part of their lives; yet, sir, these men adorned society. Why is n’t there A——, now, whom you know as well as I? Is he not in possession of all his faculties, mental and corporeal? Who writes a keener epigram? Who reasons more wittily? Who —— but, stay! I have his agreement in my pocket-book.”
This is another Poe story originally submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Morning Courier in 1831, and supposedly destined for that never-to-be-publ This is another Poe story originally submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Morning Courier in 1831, and supposedly destined for that never-to-be-published collection of pastiches, homages and parodies known as Tales of the Folio Club. It is a style-parody of the short horror fiction published in England’s Blackwood’s Magazine, which typically involved breakneck escapes from unusual predicaments. Five years later Poe would write a better parody of this sort (the companion pieces “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time,” later published as “A Predicament” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article”), and ten years later he would transmute the Blackwood approach into a work of genius: “The Pit and the Pendulum.’
But “A Loss of Breath” (or “A Decided Loss,” as it was originally titled) is considerably removed from any touch of Poe’s genius. It is labored, overly long, and desperately unfunny, and should be avoided by all readers except those fascinated with everything Poe.
Instead of boring you with excerpts showing you how bad this is, I will instead show you a passage toward the beginning that I actually liked. Poe was always a precise observer and a precise thinker, and here we see the narrator, having literally ”lost his breath” arguing with his wife, discovering that he can produce some vocal sounds without any breath at all:
The phrases “I am out of breath,” “I have lost my breath,” etc., are often enough repeated in common conversation; but it had never occurred to me that the terrible accident of which I speak could bona fide and actually happen! Imagine — that is if you have a fanciful turn — imagine, I say, my wonder — my consternation — my despair! ...
Although I could not at first precisely ascertain to what degree the occurence had affected me, I determined at all events to conceal the matter from my wife, until further experience should discover to me the extent of this my unheard of calamity ...
I am serious in asserting that my breath was entirely gone. I could not have stirred with it a feather if my life had been at issue, or sullied even the delicacy of a mirror. Hard fate! — yet there was some alleviation to the first overwhelming paroxysm of my sorrow. I found, upon trial, that the powers of utterance which, upon my inability to proceed in the conversation with my wife, I then concluded to be totally destroyed, were in fact only partially impeded, and I discovered that had I, at that interesting crisis, dropped my voice to a singularly deep guttural, I might still have continued to her the communication of my sentiments; this pitch of voice (the guttural) depending, I find, not upon the current of the breath, but upon a certain spasmodic action of the muscles of the throat.
This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the besieged Jews by the besieging Romans, who not wanting to technical offend the Hebrew deity by denying him sacrificial animals, yet contrived to send him a victim he could not accept and that his devotees could not use. This is yet another of the early Poe tales first submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and eventually intended as one of the sixteen tales in the never-published collection, The Folio Club. It is derived from a passage in Horatio’s Smith’s novel Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City (1828); it is more homage than parody, and contains images—sometimes entire passages—appropriated from the original.
The following is an effective descriptive passage, in which the representatives of the beseiged—Simeon and his associates—hurry to the city walls
That part of the city to which our worthy Gizbarim now hastened, and which bore the name of its architect, King David, was esteemed the most strongly fortified district of Jerusalem; being situated upon the steep and lofty hill of Zion. Here a broad, deep, circumvallatory trench, hewn from the solid rock, was defended by a wall of great strength erected upon its inner edge. This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart, sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek--the loftiest of all the turrets around about Jerusalem, and the usual place of conference with the besieging army--they looked down upon the camp of the enemy from an eminence excelling by many feet that of the Pyramid of Cheops, and, by several, that of the temple of Belus.
I don’t know why I bothered to finish this book, but I do know why I chose to begin it.
A few weeks ago—July 18th, 2017, to be exact—I read a very fun I don’t know why I bothered to finish this book, but I do know why I chose to begin it.
A few weeks ago—July 18th, 2017, to be exact—I read a very funny New Yorker article entitled “It’s Time for Hillary Clinton to Bow Gracefully out of all Public Life, Along With all Other Women” by Daniel Kibblesmith. In it, the author creates the persona of a man who complains about Hillary Clinton’s continued media presence, but is actually more bothered by the women in his own life: his wife, his wife’s friend Grace “with the weird laugh,” and “Geraldine from human resources.” (My favorite part is this comment, which begins with Hillary and ends with his grandmother: “The last thing we need is to keep the Clinton dynasty on life support. Like my grandmother, selfishly clinging to a fortune she cannot enjoy, with one foot in the grave and the other in a tub of Epsom salt. The Newport house should be mine, Nana. The Newport house belongs to America now.”)
This Kibblesmith guy is somebody I want to hear more of, I thought. So I googled him and found out that he used to write for “The Onion News Network” and is now a staff writer for “Late Night with Steven Colbert” That was enough for me. I looked him up in the cataloque of our local library, discovered that How to Win at Everything was available as an ebook, and I ordered it immediately.
I liked the title, and immediately began to imagine the persona to go with it: a sociopath who pretends to instruct other sociopaths, but is actually only interested in making big bucks through seminars and an on-line university, a man whose metaphors and examples continually reveal a dark list of his inadequacies and fears.
But I was disappointed. There was no real persona this time. Only a scattershot collection of second-rate jokes, some pertinent and some absurd. And let me tell you, after one hundred and sixty pages, after about a thousand or so random jokes, the reader—this reader at least—becomes weary.
There’s a lesson for humorists here. All the great satirists and humorists, from Juvenal and Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain and Dave Barry, have created characters—personae—to speak for them. For it is these characters—like the woman-harried man in Kibblesmith’s New Yorker piece—that create enduring laughter.
Without a person (or at least a persona) at the heart of the humor, there is nothing but jokes. And jokes—however funny individually—get old after awhile....more
The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) is the first full-length book completely devoted to Jeeves and Wooster (My Man Jeeves, only half Jeeves, featured the pro The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) is the first full-length book completely devoted to Jeeves and Wooster (My Man Jeeves, only half Jeeves, featured the proto-Wooster Reggie Pepper), and my sense is that neither the gentleman’s gentleman, nor his gentleman, has reached perfection here. Jeeves is less Olympian, perhaps a tad too familiar with Bertie, Bingo and their betting friends, and Wooster’s narrative voice lacks that miraculous unity of brainless superficiality and incisive social observation which characterizes Woosterian narration at its finest.
In addition, the book has the disadvantage of pretending to be a novel, even though it is obviously a collection of short stories, with most of the seven stories separated into two distinct chapters. Some of the stories are too similar in plot, and the overall narrative does not increase in hilarity, as the Jeeve’s novels customarily do. All this is completely excusable in a story collection, but The Inimitable claims to be a novel.
Still it is Jeeves and Wooster, and it is funny. Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s more colorful accessories, cousins Claude and Eustace wreak social havoc, Bingo Little falls continually (oh so inappropriately) in love, Bertie tries to help but mucks up everything, and “Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastadons bellowing across primeval swamps.”
The elements of classic Jeeves and Wooster are all here. And this book is a good beginning....more
H.P. Lovecraft stories don't usually make me think of Mel Brooks and Bruce Campbell, but "Herbert West" is definitely an exception.
This story, like H. H.P. Lovecraft stories don't usually make me think of Mel Brooks and Bruce Campbell, but "Herbert West" is definitely an exception.
This story, like H.P.’s subsequent work “The Lurking Fear,” was written to-order as a serial publication for the humor magazine Home Brew. Although Lovecraft’s interest in atmospheric effects often mars “The Lurking Fear”’s humorous tone, “Herbert West” is unharmed by any serious horror. On the contrary, H.P. embraces this over-the-top tale of “re-animation”—a congeries of cliches filched from Frankenstein, “The Body Snatcher” and more debased sources—and makes of it a mocking parody of gothic horror, the only thoroughly successful work of death’s head humor Lovecraft ever achieved.
Herbert West, the grave blue-eyed, blond-haired medical student and his narrator sidekick, raid the nearby graveyards and hospitals looking for fresh corpses to stir into life. Although they may produce a series of twitches, a leap or a howl—and even the occasional word here and there—their experiments are ludicrous failures. Still, these failures are more successful than they think, and literally come back to haunt them.
Lovecraft clearly enjoyed writing this farce, and I think you will enjoy reading it too, appreciating how he transforms his great weakness as a writer—a penchant for overwrought prose—into a positive strength. I particularly like how he deals with one of the challenges of serial publication—the recap at the beginning of each episode—and turns it to his advantage, creating a somewhat different recap every time, each entertaining in its own way. Unfortunately, “Herbert West” also has more than a touch of Lovecraft’s customary zenophobia and racism (brutish negroes, superstition Italians, etc.) but here these odious tendencies are partially redeemed by irony: the most degenerate, decadent example of humanity displayed here is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Herbert West himself:
Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did—that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment—a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
Twenty-six months after Lee surrendered to Grant, the thirty-one-year-old Samuel Clemens, a ‘special traveling correspondent” for San Francisco’s Alta Twenty-six months after Lee surrendered to Grant, the thirty-one-year-old Samuel Clemens, a ‘special traveling correspondent” for San Francisco’s Alta California newspaper, boarded the recently decommissioned USS Quaker City—a steamship once active in enforcing the Union blockade—and embarked on a five-and-a-half-month “pleasure excursion” to Europe and the Holy Land. The Alta California payed Clemen’s $1,250 fare (more than $20,000 in today’s money) in return for a series of letters describing the travelers’ adventures, but Clemens—then known only as an itinerant reporter and a minor regional humorist—got more out of the deal than just a fancy trip. Two years later he published The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869). The American public not only loved it for its humor, but also valued it as a travel guide. In spite of the classics that came after, it was always his best-selling book. By 1870, Mark Twain had become a household name.
Twain’s tone can often be uneven and problematic, and this is doubly true of Innocents. He alternates plain-spoken folksy humor with flowery praises for the scenery, and it is often difficult to tell whether Twain is satirizing the boorish American, or whether he is indeed the American boor personified. (His almost complete lack of appreciation for the paintings of Italy particularly irritated me. Yes, I know, there are a helluva lot of Madonnas, but still.) Some of the flowery passages are impressive: his descriptions of Venice and the Acropolis at midnight are excellent. But it is the blunt, skeptical Twain that is the most memorable, always suspicious of the historicity of an ancient tradition—particularly if it is being used to pick an American’s pocket. (His treatment of the landmarks and relics of the Holy Land are some of the funniest passages in the book.)
For the Twain fan, one of the interesting things about this book is its unevenness, its variability of tone. It shows us a writer who is in the process of crafting his voice, and, by the end of the journey, he has found it.
Here are few excerpts showing Twain’s range. First, Twain the skeptic’s exposes the “English Spoken Here” fraud of the shopkeepers of Paris.
In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign “English Spoken Here,” just as one sees in the windows at home the sign “Ici on parle francaise.” We always invaded these places at once — and invariably received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in an hour — would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it was a base fraud — a snare to trap the unwary — chaff to catch fledglings with. They had no English-murdering clerk. They trusted to the sign to inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.
Second, Twain the romantic describes the city of Venice:
We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an airing. We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church. And at midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there, and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water — of stately buildings — of blotting shadows — of weird stone faces creeping into the moonlight — of deserted bridges — of motionless boats at anchor. And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.
Third, Twain the cynic takes us on a tour of the grottos of the Holy Land:
They have got the “Grotto” of the Annunciation here; and just as convenient to it as one’s throat is to his mouth, they have also the Virgin’s Kitchen, and even her sitting-room, where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour play with Hebrew toys eighteen hundred years ago. All under one roof, and all clean, spacious, comfortable “grottoes.” It seems curious that personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes — in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus — and yet nobody else in their day and generation thought of doing any thing of the kind. If they ever did, their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we ought to wonder at the peculiar marvel of the preservation of these I speak of. When the Virgin fled from Herod’s wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same is there to this day. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto — both are shown to pilgrims yet. It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all happened in grottoes — and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever. It is an imposture — this grotto stuff — but it is one that all men ought to thank the Catholics for. Wherever they ferret out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straightway build a massive — almost imperishable — church there, and preserve the memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations …. The old monks are wise. They know how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to its place forever.
Oh, I almost forgot. The Quaker City cruise not only made Sam Clemens famous: it got him a wife as well. One of the friends he made on the voyage was Charles Langdon, who showed him a photograph of his sister Olivia. Twain later declared it was love at first sight. Soon after the Quaker City returned to New York, Sam and Olivia had their first date: they attended a reading by Dickens. On February 8, 1870, Sam and his beloved “Livy” were married....more
If you consider a man's “best” books to be the ones with the most consistent tone and the fewest flaws, then Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper If you consider a man's “best” books to be the ones with the most consistent tone and the fewest flaws, then Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper are Mark Twain’s best works of fiction. If, however, “best” means the most interesting, the most resonant, even if the flaws are considerable and the results problematic, then that honor belongs to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Huckleberry Finn, and—I would argue—The Tragedy of Puddin’head Wilson too.
The flaws and the problems of Twain’s fiction stem from the fact that the limited but parochial projects of Twain the humorist are often undermined and thwarted by the comprehensive soul of Twain the writer of fiction. In Connecticut Yankee, for example, as much as Twain admired Yankee know-how and despised the “jejune romanticism” of Sir Walter Scott, there was still a part of him that grudgingly admired Southern chivalry and was appalled by how Yankee know-how literally blew that chivalry apart on the great battlefields of the Civil War. For this reason, an essentially humorous book about a cunning modern inventor who outfoxes King Arthur’s finest ends with a bitter picture of modern warfare which considerably alters its tone. And the end of Huckleberry Finn exhibits similar problems in the comic—but essentially unfunny—return of Tom Sawyer to the narrative.
Puddin’head Wilson—a smaller but equally resonant work—is comparably problematic. It began as a novel with the title Those Extraordinary Twins, featuring a pair of conjoined twins based on a well known Italian pair, Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci. Twain wished to contrast their relatively happy life with the dark story of two little Missouri boys growing up in the small town of Dawson’s Landing in the years before the Civil War. The two boys look much alike, but Tom is to be the master of the house, and Chambers is to be his slave. The story of how they are made to switch places, together with tale of Puddin’head Wilson, a lawyer who eventually resolves the mystery—if not the resulting tragedy—through the newly emerging science of fingerprinting, is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, it completely overwhelmed the story of the Italian twins. Twain left them—unconjoined- to wander with little purpose through the story, a baffling vestige of his original comic conception.
Still, it is a powerful narrative, particularly in its account of how the institution of slavery molds the characters of both the false master and the false slave. Twain’s touch is not always sure—there are even moments when Twain appears to be saying that even a drop “black blood’ may be enough to taint the human character—but at its basis this is a profound tale of the fatal effect of nurture versus nature, and how two boys switched at birth can be changed irrevocably, particularly when one is slave and one is free.
The novel isn’t perfect, but it is also a rattling good mystery, with a lot of good stuff about fingerprints, an exciting courtroom scene, and a wickedly ironic conclusion to the fate of the faux master. It’s got problems, sure, but it is well worth a read....more
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