Mark Twain’s religious beliefs may have changed over time, but there is one thing he always firmly believed in: telepathy. Chantel Tattoli tells the story in The Paris Review:

He believed, he once wrote,  that a mind ‘still inhabiting the flesh’ could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as ‘the oddest thing that ever happened to me.’

The mail had just come at Twain’s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. ‘Now I will do a miracle,’ he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn’t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been ‘in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.’ Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: ‘Dear Dan—Wonders never will cease.’

* * *

Three years before his heart attack, in 1907, he wrote that ‘inventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books’ could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, ‘I often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else’s.’ The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he’d composed seventeen years earlier—’hilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,’ and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. Twain concluded that ‘Mr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head…’

In other news: Sam Leith defends Ayn Rand’s prose. “Rand is famous, these days, for being the favourite writer of the Worst People On Earth, and when her name is mentioned in literary conversation it is invariably in connection with her ideology. She is assumed, in Sellar and Yeatman terms, to be a Bad Thing – and therefore also a terrible writer. Our ideological enemies must have poor taste, right?  Well… the Folio Society having last year republished it in a lavish edition, I settled down to read Atlas Shrugged rather than just tweet about it. The skinny on it is this: Rand undoubtedly has poor taste but she is not, sentence by sentence, a terrible writer. Sometimes she’s even a halfway good one. She can produce scenes and set pieces of dramatic effectiveness and makes good phrases in her thundering way.”

“Randall Swingler (1909-67) deserves a place in every anthology of English poetry, above all for the poems he composed as a soldier fighting in the Italian campaign during the last two years of the Second World War. At his best, he writes with a breath-taking simplicity and boldness.” Robert Chandler revisits his work.

Books on time—John Wilson recommends a few: “If you are interested in ‘time’ and how people think about it, write about it, talk about it, visualize it, you should read Joseph Mazur’s The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time. There’s much to take issue with, to roll your eyes at now and then, but also much incitement to thought. It is, moreover, a very unusual book, highly “personal” in a way that is both vexing and winsome.”

In praise of Tristram Shandy: “Tristram Shandy is a ‘book of books’. Sterne’s imagination shapes all manner of sources into an idiosyncratic encyclopaedia dealing, among other things, with time, chance, hot chestnuts, misguided learning, midwifery, names, wounds, fortification, love, the importance of putting your breeches on efficiently, procrastination, loyalty, impotence, door hinges—and noses: ‘by the word Nose . . . I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less’.”

A history of book burning: “Three infamous conflagrations illuminate the pages of Richard Ovenden’s fascinating new history, Burning the Books. The first is the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which, according to Ovenden, did not go up in a single blaze but was gradually destroyed by repeated acts of arson and plunder, until there was nothing left but a metaphor. The second is the burning of the US Library of Congress by the British in 1814, when soldiers’ faces were ‘illumined’ by the flames. ‘I do not recollect to have witnessed, at any period in my life,’ a British soldier said, ‘a scene more striking or sublime.’ The third burning is certainly the best known: the Nazi Bücherverbrennungen that followed Hitler’s rise to power. ‘The 10 May 1933 book-burning was merely the forerunner of arguably the most concerted and well-resourced eradication of books in history,’ Ovenden writes.”

Today’s reminder that things are terrible and getting worse: Madeline Sayet “interrogates” the “Shakespeare system”: “I want to talk about Shakespeare. Not Shakespeare the playwright or Shakespeare the poet, but, rather, Shakespeare the system—and what it means for all of us artists, educators, and administrators to be upholding that system. For clarification, the Shakespeare system is not simply Shakespeare’s written work, but the complex and oppressive role his work, legacy, and positionality hold in our contemporary society . . . Promoting Shakespeare as the ‘best’ writer of all time is a dangerous and white supremacist viewpoint. Until the Shakespeare field as a whole learns how to examine that, theatres that produce his work cannot be welcoming spaces for people whose ancestors were beaten and forced to give up their own languages and learn Shakespeare’s.” Oh, dear. 

Photo: Beaulieu-lès-Loches  

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