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First Love
Twain parody of creation myth reveals the writer's uncommon wit
By Michael Sims
JUNE 26, 2000:
Each of us would compose a different list of great American heroes.
High on my own list--alongside Frederick Douglass, Rachel Carson, Thomas
Paine, Margaret Sanger, and others--would be an uneducated Missouri country
boy who grew up to become one of the most important writers in U.S.
history. "Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great
humorist?" asked Thomas Hardy in 1883. "He is a remarkable fellow in every
way."
Hardy understood that Mark Twain's humor was merely a side-effect
of his unique point of view. He knew that Twain's legacy would not be
merely droll outrageousness, but a sensibility--an overall impression of a
deeply humane and civilized man who went his own way as a person and as an
artist. No wonder that, more than a century after Hardy's comment, Robert
Penn Warren said, "As Lincoln freed the slave, Twain freed the writer."
Twain's legacy is still impressive. Few books for children or adults are
more perfectly observed, phrased, and balanced than Tom Sawyer.
While the otherwise magnificent Huckleberry Finn goes all to hell
when Tom Sawyer arrives to play Don Quixote, the book remains entertaining,
tragic, and one of the great anti-slavery documents. Twain pilloried
chivalry in Connecticut Yankee and was the first mystery writer to
use fingerprints to catch a felon in Pudd'nhead Wilson. And surely
few books are more courageous than Letters From the Earth, a
brilliant satire on society in the form of a retelling of much of the
Bible.
Recently a small publisher in San Francisco, Fair Oaks Press, published
a handsome little hardback that reminds us just how remarkable a man and
how free a writer Mark Twain really was. The Diaries of Adam and Eve
("translated by Mark Twain") consists of the interwoven texts of relatively
brief pieces Twain originally wrote as part of Letters From the
Earth. Many of Twain's books have been denounced for various reasons,
but none so often as Letters. But in the sections about Adam and
Eve, Twain isn't out to lampoon the smugness of Christian fundamentalism.
Inevitably he works in a little of that--the topic demands it--but mostly
he has other literary fish to fry. The Diaries of Adam and Eve is
about a lot of things, but mostly it is about romantic love.
As every pop song, TV movie, or therapist will attest, few things in
life are more important to us or more difficult to get right than romantic
love. Most of us are needy, immature, unreasonable, loaded with a lifetime
of emotional baggage--and yet yearning for loving companionship with
another, similarly flawed human being. Mark Twain takes the confusions and
troubles of love back to the stars of one of Western society's most
cherished myths. In alternating first-person accounts, the first man and
first woman tell the amusing, touching story of their awkward first
encounters, their troubled early days, and their later devotion to each
other.
Eve's first entry in her diary reads simply, "Who am I? What am I? Where
am I?" These words echo the summation of the human condition that Paul
Gauguin famously painted into one of his Tahitian idylls: "Where did we
come from? What are we? Where are we going?"
Eve's cosmic meditations contrast with Adam's more shallow and insecure
musings. At first he complains about the unsolicited attentions of this new
creature: "I don't like this; I am not used to company. I wish it would
stay with the other animals.... The new creature eats too much fruit. We
are going to run short most likely." In time, inevitably, Adam discovers
his opinion changing. "Cloudy today, wind in the east; think we shall have
rain," he confides to his diary. Then he adds, "We? Where did I get
that word?... I remember now--the new creature uses it." Knowing that he
took Eve for granted in the beginning, Adam eventually feels grateful for
the Fall and their resulting troubles, which brought them so much closer
together.
One of the fun things in The Diaries of Adam and Eve is the way
that Eve turns out to be an early naturalist. She watches to see how milk
gets into a cow, and she invents fire. When, to her astonishment, her first
child is born, she writes, "Some of its details were human, but there were
not enough of them to justify me in scientifically classifying it under
that head." She can't stop asking "Why?"
In doing so, Eve frequently gets a hint that things are not always as
they seem in the Garden, and Twain is able to wink at the reader with a
forecast of troubles to come. As Adam complains to himself, "She engages
herself in many foolish things: among others, trying to study out why the
animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers when, as she
says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to
eat each other."
Of course, Twain was a man of his time, and most of his portrayals of
women--Eve included--paint them as pure-hearted and devoted to their men.
There is, however, genuine affection between Adam and Eve, once Adam
overcomes his initial confusion by and tepid interest in the new creature.
Not surprisingly, such a story comes from Twain's own experience. He
absolutely worshipped his wife, Olivia, and was devastated when she died.
His letters, always some of his most amusing and observant literary
productions, include 184 love letters to his Livy.
When Livy died in 1904 at the age of 58, Twain wrote to a friend, "I am
a man without a country. Wherever Livy was, that was my country." Adam's
last words about his beloved in The Diaries of Adam and Eve are
similar: "Wheresoever she was; there was Eden."

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