{"id":78170,"date":"2014-02-10T07:54:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T12:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=78170"},"modified":"2015-05-10T09:39:54","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T13:39:54","slug":"the-books-the-complete-essays-of-mark-twain-at-the-shrine-of-st-wagner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=78170","title":{"rendered":"The Books: The Complete Essays of Mark Twain<\/i>, ‘At the Shrine of St. Wagner’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"complete-essays\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

\nThis gigantic book of essays is something I have dipped into over the years, as a reference, as entertainment. It’s so broad, so vast, the topics Twain covers are so diverse. An embarrassment of riches.<\/p>\n

I’ve been re-reading it over last autumn, and there’s always something new that I find, an essay I don’t remember reading (although there are some emblazoned in my memory forever). These are essays that go from the 1890s up until the year of his death There is very little editorial commentary, which I like. Context is not provided for each essay. You have to just go with it. Oh, so now he’s in France, now he’s in Hawaii, now he’s home, whatever. His travelogues are something else, which isn’t a surprise. I love Innocents Abroad<\/i>. Some of the essays make me laugh out loud. There are only one or two bores. Mark Twain, like very few authors I can think of, seems like good company. He is good company. His personality vibrates off the page. You can almost hear him speaking. He has points to make, sometimes extremely serious points, but he does not hide behind a flurry of verbiage meant to obfuscate or impress. The prose is direct. Obviously he worked hard, and edited, but these seem like they could have been dictated, that’s how immediate it feels. <\/p>\n

In an interview given to the Paris Review<\/i> in 1981, Dame Rebecca West (one of my idols) says:<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I longed, when I was young, to write as well as Mark Twain. It\u2019s beautiful stuff and I always liked him. If I wanted to write anything that attacked anybody, I used to have a look at his attack on Christian Science, which is beautifully written. He was a man of very great shrewdness. The earliest article on the Nazis, on Nazism, a sort of first foretaste, a prophetic view of the war, was an article by Mark Twain in Harper\u2019s in, I should think, the nineties. He went to listen to the Parliament in Vienna and he describes an awful row and what the point of view of Luger, the Lord Mayor, was, and the man called George Schwartz, I think, who started the first Nazi paper, and what it must all lead to. It\u2019s beautifully done. It\u2019s the very first notice that I\u2019ve ever found of the Austrian Nazi Party, that started it all.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are four or five essays from Germany and Vienna, some are explicitly political and have to do with the official language of Germany, a hot topic, which had, at its base, a vicious anti-Semitism, explicit and out there, only no one seemed to see anything ominous about it, anything that was predicting “This is leading us down a bad bad path.” Twain saw it. But we’ll get to that. <\/p>\n

In this fascinating essay, written in 1891, he visits Bayreuth to go to the Wagner festival. He becomes somewhat \u2026 uneasy, during the experience. He describes the festival in detail (it is often hilarious), the beer halls, the way the theatre is set up, how impossible it is to get a room in the area. You need to book a year in advance. He is an “innocent abroad”, staring around him and trying to interpret this well-known event, trying to do what the others do (“Oh \u2026 so I can leave the theater for lunch now? Or \u2026 will I lose my seat?”), and also watching a bunch of opera. There’s a great section where one of the “imperial princesses” of Germany enters her balcony seat and the entire theatre stands up to bow to her. He is fascinated by the display, but disgusted as well. The reverence, the submissiveness of the crowd \u2026 He is glad he is an American and he is glad they don’t have to do that shit back home. (But he says it much better than I just did.) These are great essays because while, yes, this is giving us a day-by-day report of the Wagner festival, it’s not just about the operas he sees. It’s about the whole environment. Because it’s Mark Twain, even his descriptions of where he went to get lunch are fascinating and entertaining. <\/p>\n

Here he describes one of the days of the festival. <\/p>\n

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, ‘At the Shrine of St. Wagner’, by Mark Twain<\/big><\/p>\n

They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night. Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen lead singers, and apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out and let the public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list. <\/p>\n

Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of audiences – at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals – but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.<\/p>\n

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show their clothes.<\/p>\n

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity? Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion. It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see, there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world, there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.<\/p>\n

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion. <\/p>\n