“There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.”
Let’s not beat around the bush: Mark Twain really, really did not think much of James Fenimore Cooper or his novels. The man was clearly talented and wildly popular (two things which, of course, do not necessarily go together), but Twain only saw him as a hack. This is actually one of the nicer quotes about Cooper to be found in the essay titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”
“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.”
One of Twain’s most popular and famous essays is “How to Tell a Story” which, perhaps surprisingly, is actually about what its title suggests. Here he outlines a very important distinction and secret to success too often overlooked. The idea that Twain is getting at here is perhaps most easily accessed to the modern reader through a more recent application: the movie Airplane! is an example of humor because the story is presented seriously. On the other hand, the comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective announces it is going to be funny straight from the title.
“How curious and interesting is the parallel — as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned — between Satan and Shakespeare.”
Oddly enough, in the essay titled “Is Shakespeare Dead?” Twain embarks upon a digression from the titular subject into an area of autobiography in which we discover that he had once entertained the notion of writing a biography of Satan. This notion occurred, was discussed and promptly dismissed by his Sunday school teacher before the young Samuel Clemens actually sat down and composed it. The digression seems off the topic of the essay itself which is an investigation into whether the William Shakespeare about whom so little is known could actually have been the author of the plays attributed to him.
“La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!”
The essay is title “A Simplified Alphabet” and in it, Twain very strongly makes an assertion about the English alphabet: “It doesn’t know how to spell, and can’t be taught.” The rest of the essay is therefore and examination of the singular peculiarities of how English words often wind up being spelled in ways that bear little resemblance to how they are actually pronounced. And so Twain offers up his idea of a simplified alphabet that is more attuned to the similarity between sound and appearance. But, as he admits, such a transformation would be almost impossible because seeing “letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed offends the eye.” A point made tacitly clear with this rewrite of a famous quote from Macbeth rebooted in the style of his simplified alphabet.
