August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

July 25, 2008
Washington, DC

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The thing about Mark Twain is, every line he ever wrote is almost as quotable as the lines everybody already quotes. After a while you get the idea that John Bartlett and his quote-truffling successors just threw up their hands and started picking Twainisms at random.

I mention this because Time magazine recently anointed Twain its cover boy for the apparently annual “Making of America” issue. Near as I can tell, this issue is an attempt to broaden the franchise of the magazine’s signature Person of the Year cover, so as to make room for a Dead American Person of the Year too. The previous posthumous honorees have been Lewis & Clark, Ben Franklin, and presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy instead of Franklin? In a pig’s valise!

We know what Twain would’ve thought about sharing his pedestal with TR: “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.”

See what I mean about the quotability? For more Twain on Roosevelt, by all means check out http://www.twainquotes.com/Roosevelt.html.

The Time stories actually form a pretty fair introduction to Twain, with only one or two solecisms. Two different writers get Hemingway on Twain slightly wrong. Papa didn’t say that all modern American literature can be traced back to Mark Twain, he said “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Not a small difference, to my way of thinking.

But the comic essayist and drawling Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me panelist Roy Blount Jr. is always a joy to read, even if they saddle him with the heavy lifting of the package’s biographical essay (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html). He gets five pages, which is twice as much linage as anybody else gets and then some. Again and again, Blount makes the case for Twain as an endlessly renewable prophet, as when he quotes him on the “quagmire” of Roosevelt’s turn-of the-century Philippine-American War. Remind me to look up in the OED whether anybody beat Twain to that particular connotation of quagmire, but I doubt it. Two sentences later, Blount echoes Twain’s recognition that occupied casualties usually outnumber occupying ones when he notes that “more than 200,000 Filipino civilians had been killed, along with 4,200 Americans.”

Later on, Stephen L. Carter gets to the heart of Twain on race (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820162,00.html ), even if he overstates the case a tad when he writes, “It might be fair to call [Twain] the inventor of the American short story.” I don’t know what E.A. Poe would have said about that, but knowing him, “I’ll send my seconds with a choice of weapons and have my satisfaction” is a possibility.

Still, these are quibbles. Time has come through with a decent primer on Twain for a general readership, a readership that Twain could take for granted as almost no one can anymore. As an examplar of The Big Read’s perpetual watchword in preparing our materials – essentially, inform the nonreader without boring the expert – Time has got it right.

Which Big Read author rates the next Making of America cover? I realize that’s exactly the question that Time’s Luce-ites (as they used to be called, in sarcastic deference to publisher Henry Luce) want me to ask, but it’s just too much fun not to. Unfortunately, the other novelists on the Big Read list haven’t changed America in ways conspicuous enough for the public eye to discern–however better the world might be if they had.

I’d argue that Twain helped “make America” because he wrote nonfiction as well as fiction. In his novels he created the quintessential American voice, as well as a model of bygone childhood against which we still measure the modern version. But just as important, in his essays he inveighed against a peculiar arrested adolescence that also shadows the American character.

Nonfiction can knock the world off its axis, but a good story well told can only hope to nudge it. Think of all the prose that’s changed the world: the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed. Only the Emancipation Proclamation could be said to have drawn inspiration from fiction, specifically Uncle Tom’s Cabin — which Jane Smiley claims to like better than Huck Finn, but believe that at your peril.

This ambidexterity between fiction and nonfiction is something I particularly admire about our Readers Circle member Wendell Berry, who throws in poetry besides, and also farms a spread of crops in Port Royal, Kentucky, in his spare time. During the Big Ride in September, I hope to look him up and ask him how he does it …

January 16, 2008
Washington, DC

All the best books are sequels. Think about it. The Odyssey? Sequel. Ulysses? Sequel. Huck Finn? Sequel. In that spirit, I hereby present a sequel to my earlier Twain columns, this one about Tom and Huck and their roles in their own — and each other’s — books.

It ought to be a fruitful topic, because Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — both the characters and their namesake books — represent two sides of the same raft. Tom is topside, sunny, always flirting with the rapids but still hugging the shore of childhood and civilized life. Huck, meanwhile, stands for the underside, the deep, dark, wet, turbulent, rushing confusion of adulthood and moral awakening. Each, naturally, reflects half of the raft of contradictions that was Mark Twain himself.

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Nowhere is this contrast plainer than in three episodes that occur, with significant differences, in both books. First, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and then in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, each hero gets to live out every morbid, underappreciated kid’s greatest fantasy: to spy on his own funeral and hear how sorry everybody is, and then to come back from the dead to a hero’s welcome.

Tom merely lucks into his version of this perennial childhood fantasy, while Huck characteristically takes matters into his own hands. Inadvertently presumed dead, Tom sneaks back into town and has the archetypally delicious experience of secretly watching family, friends and sweetheart all cry their eyes out for him. Huck, on the other hand, deliberately fakes his own death to escape his father, who soon afterward — in a terrifying scene, even for readers who don’t know that Twain’s brother died in similar circumstances — turns up dead aboard “a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock.”

To paraphrase Ian Fleming: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action. For Twain to use this scenario twice attests to the spell it always held over him. That he could use it to create two such different moods — the one robustly comic, the other “powerful lonesome” — only confirms his incomparable gift.

The second element both books share is the scenes Tom and Huck have together. Although Huck is the more mature character, Tom usually takes the dominant role in these encounters. An incorrigible know-it-all, utterly without self-doubt, Tom is forever forcing Huck into whatever scenario he’s borrowed from superstition, or from some pirate story he’s read. Huck plays along, much as Twain played along with his patient wife’s never permanently successful attempts to force him into quitting smoking, drinking, swearing, or writing his more sacrilegious books. Interestingly, by the end of their close yet tragedy-shadowed marriage, it was Livy who was losing her faith in divine providence.

The last thing both books have in common is their endings. Without spoiling either conclusion for readers lucky enough to have those surprises still in store, one can say that each book ends with the undomesticated Huck reluctantly agreeing to give Tom’s town life one more try. In a line eerily reminiscent of Twain’s marriage, Huck says on the last page of Tom Sawyer that “If [the Widow Douglas will] let up on some of the rougher things, I’ll smoke private and cuss private, and crowd through or bust.”

The notoriously maddening ending of Huck Finn turns out the same way. Huck improbably winds up back home with his friend the runaway slave Jim, and the townsfolk will get yet another chance to housebreak Huck.

One mark of a great book is that even its flaws strike us as heroic and brimful of significance. Huck is the classic example. Twain can fudge the geography all he wants with Huck and Jim getting lost in a fog, but there’s something’s fundamentally haywire with a slave narrative in which the Underground Railroad rolls straight into the heart of the Confederacy.

Yet look closer at the problem and see if it isn’t a flaw common to every imperfect life. Huck and Jim have gone wrong after the fork, they’ve overshot something crucial, they’ve lost their way and don’t know how to get back. Who among us hasn’t felt the same? Twain certainly did. He published his best book at 50 but lived to 75, and he never got his swing back as a novelist after Huck.

Huck and Jim’s journey is an endlessly renewable metaphor, so large and versatile that even its principal flaw echoes in the lives of its creator and his countrymen. Tom Sawyer, meanwhile — too mischievous for his teachers and aunt, but a model boy compared with Huck — embodies Twain’s, and America’s, quintessential tension between the wilderness of the frontier and the coziness of the parlor. Twain saw as clearly as anybody since that we’re all on this raft together, afloat between oceans, crewed by oarsmen of more than one color, tippy but not aground, not yet.

January 8, 2008
San Francisco, CA

“The picture [of small-town Missouri in Tom Sawyer ] will be instructive to those who have fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come to represent the Southwest in literature. ”

–William Dean Howells’ review of Tom Sawyer in the Atlantic Monthly

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

I know I only mentioned Howells’ reputation-making review of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad on Friday — at a link that appears to have crashed the University of Virginia’s server, no less. But I ran across this quote from Howell’s friendly piece on Tom Sawyer and just had to work it in.

The review may indeed be a little too chummy, considering that Howells and Twain had since the earlier review become quite close friends. What jumps out at me, though, is Howells’ endearingly Bostonian ideas about North American geography. First there’s his reference to “Pike County” — evidently more a byword for backwoods caricature then than now. Either that or maybe Howells was just, in Thomas Pynchon’s great phrase about misunderstood regionalism, showing off his ear before he had one.

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.

I’ve been griping about the coast-ism of the phrase “Pacific Northwest” for years, but it never occurred to me that the ever-mysterious East might have needed a Pacific Southwest to go with it. Then again, I can still remember the storied $25 no-reservation midnight flights between LA and San Francisco on PSA, alias “Pacific Southwest Airlines,” so traces may yet persist. Of course, by Tom Sawyer’s appearance in 1876 — fully a quarter century after California statehood — Howells should have known better. Sometimes they can be a little slow on the uptake out there in the Atlantic Northeast.

December 28, 2007
Washington, DC

My draft of the Tom Sawyer Reader’s Guide is due in mid-January, so I’ve got Twain on the brain. Each of our guides contains a few choice quotations from the author in question. The problem with Twain, naturally, is keeping the number of possible quotables somewhere down in the low hundreds.

Today I’m kicking myself for not bringing in my copy of the new book Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. I just dipped into this chrestomathy last night, and of course Twain is good for at least a dozen or more entries. Plus, NEA Media Arts Director Ted Libbey just walked in here and put in a good word for his favorite: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Me, I’ve always had a soft spot for, “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” Here are a few more contenders, along with an observation or two for or against:

“‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.” — Like many of the great Twain apothegms, this one comes from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. It’s certainly appropriate to The Big Read, but maybe a mite too defeatist for our purposes.

“Each person is born with one possession which outvalues all his others — his last breath.” I’ve never seen this one before. It captures well the peculiar Twain morbidity that makes almost every laugh sting — as does the following:

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” That’s vintage Twain, pure black metaphor, without the usual dusting of comedy this time. I’ll never look at the night sky in quite the same way.

Yet none of these plums may make it into the Reader’s Guide, which generally runs to quotes either about writing or taken from the book at hand. Not that Tom Sawyer is any slouch in the quotability department, mind you. Just rereading the book this week, I’ve come across several that loom as Reader’s Guide timber:

“Rules governing literary art require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” That’s from Twain’s takedown of Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper, and there are 18 other rules where that came from. I urge you to seek them out at http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/wilson/pwequat.html.

“She would be sorry some day — maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die temporarily!” In his two most enduring books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its habitually underrated partner, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, both title characters essentially attend their own funerals. To paraphrase Ian Fleming: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action. For Twain to use this scenario twice attests to the spell it always held over him. That he could use it to create two such different moods — robustly comic for Tom, “powerful lonesome” for Huck — only confirms his incomparable gift.

“There were some that believed [Tom] would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.” Here is Tom Sawyer in a snapshot: half Eagle Scout, half outlaw. This rift may better reflect Twain himself than even the more famous, better-realized character of Huck. The presidential Tom feels closer to the man Twain’s wife wanted him to be: upstanding, honorable, well-liked, romantic. It’s mainly away from Livy that we get the other Twain, the one closer to Huck, the bad boy at the cotillion.

The final apportioning of Twain quotes awaits the first draft of my guide next month, but the foregoing should give some earnest of the happy hell I’m in, trying to pick and choose which aspects to emphasize of this titanic, protean, Janus-faced genius. The language here is deliberately mythic, as befits a man whose influence still shadows American literature a hundred years later. I can’t wait to get on the road next fall and see what 21st-century America makes of him…

August 6, 2007
Washington, DC

“Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys [foul] up again, I’m going to get mad. Goodnight.”

Sometimes, when you can’t get a quote out of your head, the only thing to do is print it out and tack it on your wall. Mark Twain once prescribed a different remedy in a great essay for the Hannibal Courier-Post called “Punch, Brothers, Punch.” In it, the narrator can’t get an annoying, singsong streetcar conductor’s refrain out of his head. “Punch, brothers!” it goes. Punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!”

The author of our 2008 Big Read addition Tom Sawyer communicates the sheer contagious obnoxiousness of this ditty so expertly that I hesitated to quote it here, but, well, tough. Now you’re stuck with it. I feel justified in quite possibly infecting you with this tiresome rhyme, since Twain’s own implicit advice when you can’t shake some irritating ditty or quote was to pass it along to someone else.

In my case, for several months now, the quotation obsessing me has been the one prefacing this post. I suppose I could challenge readers like you to identify it, but Google has long since taken most of the fun out of trivia questions. The line comes from William Goldman’s script for All the President’s Men, as delivered by the late Jason Robards as editor Ben Bradlee to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein. I’ve always loved that line’s grandiosity, its simultaneous invocation of noblest patriotism and shameless but self-aware egomania.

Now, whyever might this remind me of the Big Read? I can’t imagine. But if you twist my arm, I might just have to jettison the jokey, self-deprecating air I wear like a threadbare suit and declare what the Big Read means to me personally: that is, almost everything.

For reasons that don’t bear elaboration, but pretty much boil down to procrastination and stupidity, I am a childless 43-year-old man. I have one demonstrable skill, book reviewing, which has become increasingly unmarketable. My one real stake in the future is the Big Read, a daft, longshot bet on literature — both as a force of social cohesion “in a murderous time,” as the poet Stanley Kunitz once wrote, and also as a non-negotiably good thing in itself.

In other words, nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, fate of American literature, the survival of reading as a cornerstone of citizenship, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys — or, more likely, me — [foul] it up, I’m going to get mad.

I’m sorry to unload on you like this. I’ll be back on Tuesday with another dose of breezy unsolicited advice and amateur public-domain photography. But, in between how fun and challenging and occasionally overwhelming the Big Read is for the NEA and all you sainted partners out there to work on, it’s worth the odd reminder that if efforts like ours fail, you can say “Goodnight” to a lot that’s worth cherishing. And that, if we succeed, the NEA as an institution will get more credit than it deserves, and all you Big Read contributors and volunteers, part-timers and overtimers, may get less.

That’s why, before I hyperventilate from messianic pretentiousness, my last words this morning to everybody involved in the Big Read are two that Ben Bradlee never says anywhere in All the President’s Men, and that I don’t say nearly enough — thank you.

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …