Joe B. Fulton

Trolls are nothing new

It often seems that after Shakespeare, no one has been so written about and so dissected as Mark Twain. You could fill a library with the books, reviews, magazine articles, theses, dissertations (including one of 2,370 pages) and of course, all his own publications in all their editions and languages, edited, abridged and censored. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, and many of them were patently wrong, causing debate, argument, and battles. Joe Fulton, who has contributed repeatedly to that library, has assembled a collection of such criticisms.

It’s a blur of opinions and controversy. Academics and reviewers all over the world reviewed and analyzed Twain. They reviewed each other’s reviews. They criticized each other as much as they criticized Twain. As for Twain, he has been banned in the USA, adored in Russia, questioned in Spain and pondered in France. And it’s all here, in Mark Twain Under Fire. Fulton examines them all, in minute detail. He exposes their context, background, and connections. Fulton is so meticulous he has followed these criticisms through several languages, and several editions to glean changes.

Because of his pointed style, Twain endured and understood the wrath of trolls at an early age. He wrote that he intended to create “a reputation that would stand fire.” So he was hyper conscious of the words he employed, pace the reviewers who claimed to know more about them than he did.

Fulton is obviously steeped in the knowledge of things Twain. He rubbishes rubbish reviews and reviewers, and praises insightful ones. He says books on books don’t sell very well, and this is a book about books about books. So it’s a labor of love. He takes it one era at a time rather than gather all of one kind of review. That he could engineer a rational progression of it all makes him a grand master, worth reading.

With all the amateur psychoanalyses, claims of depression, sexual proclivities, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-native, anti-women, word choice, editing, religion, note-taking and more, they all seem to have missed the Mark Twain I know. The one who loved to get a laugh at the country’s expense. Twain loved to entertain. Starting at age 16 with fake news, he kept entertaining all his life. His tools were sarcasm and satire. The USA provided the motherlode of material. As a lecturer (really the first American standup comic), he is one of only three people I know of who could talk for hours on end without a break, and leave the audience so exhausted, their sides hurt all the next day. And they couldn’t remember a thing he said. (The others were Peter Cook and Jonathan Winters.) So there’s still another book to write on Mark Twain.

David Wineberg… (altro)