Mark Twain's Joan of Arc

A Trip Down Memory Lane

This was the first book our group read and discussed. It was an odd choice, especially for a first meeting; but for reasons at once too complex and too tedious to go into now, we went with it. It did teach me to do a lot of reading up about the book and the writer before meetings, because if I hadn't had the biographical and historical information I'd culled to fall back on, it would have been a very short, quiet evening. Actually, it didn't teach me that. Reading about what I'm reading is irresistible for me. Having a shy group who mostly hadn't finished the book we were supposed to be discussing just gave me a better excuse than usual to prattle on about what I'd learned. I actually had the nerve to post this whole danged thing (I did break it up into three chunks, but still) on our local homeschooling email loop, on the assumption that everyone in the immediate vicinity who'd missed the meeting was waiting breathlessly for some kind of tell-all about Twain's most obscure title. I'm pretty sure the only reason I wasn't stoned to death at the next park day was that I was still new to the group and pretty much nobody knew me by sight yet.

Last night was the first meeting of the Classics Book Club, and I hope I'm not exaggerating when I say that a good time was had by all. It was quite a lively evening. In attendance were Pia, Annette, Theresa, Patty, Mary, and of course yours truly, along with the promised kick-bootie brownies, which were duly admired, and some shortbread and fresh fruit. The book up for discussion was Mark Twain's Joan of Arc, which although very little known among his works gave us quite a bit to talk about even aside from the writing and the book itself.

Early in the discussion, Annette highly recommended a children's book by Diane Stanley called, simply, Joan of Arc. It's beautifully illustrated and an excellent introduction to Joan's life for readers of any age, bearing in mind that any book about Joan cannot have a happy ending, or even a G-rated one in terms of family-friendly non-violence. The woman died very young for her beliefs, and of all the deliberately horrific endings one can give to a human life, burning is right up there with the worst of them.

But Joan's story is too compelling, and her name too frequent a reference, to never bring her story up at all. We have to tell our children about her sooner or later, and hope they take as much beauty as possible from her life. I remember being fascinated by her as a child. Looking over what's available about her for young readers, I found Beyond the Myth: The Story of Joan of Arc by Polly Schoyer Brooks quite good. It's a chapter rather than a picture book.

For grownups, I read (on tape -- couldn't find a print edition at the library, and unfortunately it's still in hardcover so I couldn't rationalize shelling out for a copy of my own) Mary Gordon's short biography of Joan. Some of it was excellent, but the beginning and the end were not fabulous. I will now admit that Gordon's style sometimes drives me up the wall. She tends to make these huge sweeping statements that are so patently untrue that I find myself unable to hold a conversation or read a book or even bake a decent batch of biscuits -- I pretty much can't do anything worth doing for days and days after reading them, because I'm too busy arguing with Gordon in my head. Probably I'd save myself a lot of time and my family a lot of grief if I'd just sit down and write her a damned letter, but I can't because I'm too agitated to settle down and do anything so constructive. So everyone within earshot (which means my husband and my son -- my neighbors have learned, oh how they have learned, to make themselves scarce when I've got the fire in my eyes) has to listen to me rant for however many hours it takes to get it out of my system.

I mean, really. In the introduction to the book, Gordon talks about Joan of Arc's fame and reputation. She makes the excellent point that what we know of Joan's life feels more like legend than fact -- even the facts we can confirm. Joan of Arc is more like Robin Hood than a real historical being. I think that's absolutely true, and very well put.

But then Gordon goes too far. She says, and I wrote this straight down from the tape because I found it so intensely annoying, "She may be the one person born before 1800, with the exception of Jesus Christ, that the average Westerner can name."

Oh, come ON. If she had said something like "Joan may be the one person born before 1600, with the exception of Shakespeare," she might just have been able to pull it off. But 1800? Seriously? I realize that it's fashionable (and a lot of fun) to decry the lack of education of the average Westerner dunce (and by saying the first two words, you're pretty much implying the last). And that goes about triple if the dunce -- I mean, Westerner -- is an American. But are you honestly telling me that more Westerners (and every time I type that word, it's looking weirder) have heard of Joan of Arc than have heard of Michelangelo? Leonardo? Bach? Beethoven? Plato? Homer? Mozart? Cleopatra, fer crying out corn?

And then, as if this wasn't egregious enough, Gordon says that if you collar someone on the street, he'd be able to tell you that Joan dressed in men's clothing, that she fought for France, that she had visions. Something like that. Three things about Joan, at any rate. And Gordon adds (again, direct quote), "Try to name anyone else in history about whom the popular imagination calls up three facts."

Listen, I asked my six-year-old, who is certainly bright but by no means a prodigy, for three facts about Shakespeare. He said that he wrote plays, lived a long time ago, and was English. Give me a break, already.

When I stopped hurling heavy objects at unoffending walls about this nonsense and was able to finish the book, I actually found most of the rest of it pretty good. It gave me some excellent quotes from people who knew Joan, which I will spell out in full later. And it gives a really worthwhile overview of plays and movies inspired by Joan. But I did hate a couple of short sections near the end, where Gordon talks about Joan's virginity and her breasts. Gordon makes some perfectly worthwhile points, but her manner of discussing them made me feel like an unwilling voyeur, or as if she were performing an autopsy on Joan right in front of me. Which is a pretty strong reaction to words alone, but as I mentioned, Gordon has a very distinctive style and there are times when it really gets under my skin. I would recommend the book for its information and its brevity, but now you know my objections to it. Thank you for letting me scream about them.

Back to the actual book under discussion. The following points are from my notes, plus some things that didn't get brought up at the meeting but are worth mentioning.

Joan herself was of course an extraordinary woman -- girl, really, since she died at the age of nineteen. In spite of her youth, I would definitely call her a charismatic leader. At the risk of sounding completely off-topic: several weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see Jane Goodall in person. Listening to her speak, I realized that pretty much everyone present would have done almost anything for her, and I could understand why. She wasn't grandiose, she wasn't dramatic; her voice was low and clear, her manner of speaking sweet and simple, direct and often humorous. And there was something more, something simply indescribable. It was her seventieth birthday that day, and I think I have never seen a woman so beautiful in my life. She was absolutely luminous. There seemed to be no ego whatsoever, not the smallest hint of self-importance. Everything she said, even when she spoke of herself (usually with wry humor, often self-deprecatingly), was about the work that needed doing, and how it could be done, and why she hoped it would be done.

I think Joan of Arc must have been a great deal like her. Both women are surprisingly lacking in education: Joan was completely illiterate; Goodall had no education more advanced than a secretarial course when Dr. Leakey tapped her for the field she became famous for. But both had what I, atheist though I am, would call a sort of divine spark, an absolute passion for what they wanted to do.

I gleaned the following quotations about Joan's effect on those around her from the Gordon biography:

"Jean de Metz, one of the first to join her in Vaucouleurs, said of her, 'I had a great trust in what the maid said, and I was on fire with what she said and with a love for her which was, as I believe, a divine love. I believe that she was sent by God.'"

"Margeurite la T., widow of the king's Receiver-General, says of Joan's magnetism, 'I heard those who took her to the king say that they thought her presumptuous, and their intention was to put her to the proof. But when they had set out to take her, they were ready to do whatever Joan pleased, and were as eager to present her to the king as herself, and that they could not have resisted her will.'"

Her purity and piety and the unexpected effect it had on worldly sophisticates is something like that of Marina in Shakespeare's Pericles. Marina, a pure but gorgeous young slip of a thing, is for reasons I can no longer recall shut up in a house of ill-repute. To the amazement (and considerable annoyance) of the guy who runs the place, instead of losing her virginity to line his purse, Marina uses earnest persuasiveness to convince the men who visit her at the brothel to turn their lives around and become sober, upright sorts. Her dialogue with Governor Lysimachus, with its mixture of cleverness and innocence, reminds me of Joan's while on trial. Here is a snippet of Marina's conversation with the man who ends up giving her money in praise of her wisdom and purity, rather than for sleeping with him, and if you'll excuse me, I'll excuse myself from typing out his long and awkward name every darned time he speaks:

L: Now, pretty one, how long have you been at this trade?

Marina: What trade, sir?

L: Why, I cannot name't but I shall offend.

Marina: I cannot be offended with my trade. Please you to name it.

L: How long have you been of this profession?

Marina: E'er since I can remember.

L: Did you go to't so young? Were you a gamester at five or at seven?

Marina: Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.

L: Why, the house you dwell in proclaims you to be a creature of sale.

Marina: Do you know this house to be a place of such resort, and will come into't? I hear say you're of honorable parts and are the governor of this place.

Now here is dialogue from Joan's trial, as reproduced in the wonderful volume Joan of Arc: In Her Own Words. Her questioners want desperately to catch her out in a mistake, so that they execute her for being a witch, or at least a heretic. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that she is inspired by magical beings from out of this world; but which direction are they coming from? She insists that her voices come from on high; her judges hope to trick her into admitting or revealing that they're from Old Nick. "When you saw the voice coming to you, was there any light?" one questioner asked. "There was light all about, and so there should be!" she cried. "All light does not come to you." And a moment later, on being asked if there was light when she first appeared before the king of France and brought her message from God, "There were more than three hundred knights and fifty torches -- without counting the spiritual light!"

At this interesting point in history, there were two men laying claim to the title of Pope. Joan's questioners wanted very much to have her voice support for the "wrong" one, but she wasn't having any of it. "About what I know which concerns this trial," she proclaimed (there were matters on which she refused to speak, insisting that they were not a legitimate part of the proceedings), "I will freely tell the truth, and I will tell you just as much as I should tell if I were before the Pope of Rome."

Ah! "What have you to say as to our lord the Pope," her questioner asked eagerly, "and as to whom you believe is the true Pope?"

"Are there two?" she turned back coolly.

Her questioners returned again and again to the matter of what the beings who spoke to her looked like. They were as interested in these creatures' clothing as they were in Joan's -- it was a matter of great consternation that she wore men's attire. She was determined not to doff her soldierly garb until her battle was won -- that is, until the true king of France sat once more in his rightful throne. "Which would you rather do," her questioners asked at one point, " -- put on women's clothing and hear mass, or remain in men's clothing and not hear mass?" (Dangling the opportunity to go to church in front of Joan of Arc would be rather like dangling high-quality dark chocolate in front of me: surely guaranteed, given our separate passions, to achieve the desired results.) "Assure me that I shall hear mass if I am in women's clothing, and I will answer you."

"I assure you of that," her questioner responded.

Yeah, because he'd treated her so respectfully and evenhandedly up to this point. Though she didn't voice them, Joan undoubtedly had her doubts. "And what do you say if I have sworn and promised our King not to abandon this clothing?" she asked rhetorically. "However, I answer you: Have a dress made for me, long enough to reach the ground and without a train, and give it to me to go to mass in. And then, when I come back, I will dress again in the clothing I have on."

But getting back to the garb of her voices. Her questioners were increasingly annoyed that they could get no real sense of what her visions looked like, apparently failing to understand that it is the nature of visions to be ineffable. "Have you talked with Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret since Tuesday?" they asked her. (Catherine and Margaret were the saints that spoke to her; Saint Michael sometimes appeared as well.) Yes, she had. "There is no day that I do not hear them."

"Do you always see them in the same dress?"

"I always see them in the same form," she corrected. "I know nothing of their garments."

"What form do you see?"

"I see the face."

"Was their hair long and hanging?" was the next, rather odd question.

"I do not know. And I do not know if there was any semblance of arms or of other members [body parts]. They spoke well and fairly, and I understood them well."

"How," her questioners asked triumphantly, "do they speak if they do not have members?"

"I leave that to God," Joan answered.

And then, soon after: "In what form was Saint Michael when he appeared to you?"

"I saw no crown upon him," she answered wearily. "I know nothing of his garments."

"Was he naked?"

Impertinence! And she made them feel it. "Do you think that God has not wherewith to clothe him?"

How I wish I could have seen her questioners blush or whiten with fury or embarrassment every time Joan sent them one of those zingers. Every time I read the trial, I want to cheer when I get to such brilliant simplicity. Here is a woman, little more than a girl, who grew up in a small French village and could neither read nor write but who never lost her nerve or her ability to give the perfect rejoinder to learned men who had the power of life and death over her, and who were obviously willing to exercise it. And not in her favor. At twice Joan's age, I can barely order a pizza without forgetting, when asked, my name and whether I'd like extra cheese on that.

Getting back to Shakespeare, though (and by the way, I know it's ironic that I'm using one of his characters favorably as a comparison to Joan's purity and wit, when the Bard thought, or at least wrote, that Joan was a whore). While Marina crossed verbal swords in defense of her virginity, Joan was quite literally fighting for her life. Both women have a startling composure, given their surroundings. Both are so completely sure of being in the right, they make the wealthy and powerful men who question them seem witless and fumbling in comparison.

Twain was as much under Joan's spell as any of those thousands willing to take up arms and follow her banner. In his biography The Singular Mark Twain, Fred Kaplan writes:

Fascinated by Joan's life and character, he began to buy and read everything about her he could. She seemed an embodiment of beauty and courage, an antidote to the moral ugliness of his modern world. That she was a virgin adolescent spoke to his Victorian admiration for feminine purity. That she was a courageous warrior against a corrupt church and state spoke to his partly concealed rebellious anger.

Annette mentioned that she thought Twain wrote Joan of Arc as a satire -- a work making fun of Joan and those who worshipped her. He might well have been poking fun at some of those around her; but as to Joan herself, his own admiration was completely untinged with cynicism. It was utterly unmixed. His admiring essay "Saint Joan of Arc" (which is appended to the novel in the Ignatius Press edition) makes this quite clear. I will quote only briefly here, but it makes the point well enough:

The public part of [Joan's] career occupied only a mere breath of time -- it covered but two years; but what a career it was! The personality which made it possible is one to be reverently studied, loved, and marveled at, but not to be wholly understood and accounted for by even the most searching analysis.

If I went on to quote every other glowing, unconditionally admiring comment about Joan Twain made in this essay, I would pretty much have to type out the whole thing, and we'd all have to run out and bitch-slap some innocent puppies just to counteract all the sweetness and light. Suffice it to say, there is nothing ironic about Twain's fascination with and admiration of Joan. Twain is not like Shakespeare, who writes so subtly that it is impossible to know from his words how he felt about the subjects he brought up and treated of. When Twain is angry, his words fairly spark on the page; when he is funny, he is explosively so; when he is loving or sentimental, you could bore a hole in him and watch the sap pour out. Joan of Arc is his love letter to The Maid.

Twain considered Joan of Arc his greatest work, in fact. "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books," he wrote; "and it is the best, I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none."

I believe Twain would be mortified if he could see into what deep obscurity his "best" work has fallen. It is, technically, in print, and in fact I found it on the bookstore shelf when I went to buy a copy -- I had expected to have to order it. But there was exactly one copy, by one publisher, rather than the multiplicity of editions, introductions, and presses given over to his other, "lesser" works. Joan is in fact only in print because of those other works, or perhaps I should say on the strength of them. If Mark Twain had died immediately after publishing his first novel, Tom Sawyer, he would still be considered a master writer; if he had only ever published Joan of Arc, we would never have heard of him.

(I can hear Mary and Theresa now: "Hey! I liked that book!" I did too, actually. But it was still a deeply flawed work. I'll talk more about its strengths and weaknesses later, but let me just say now that although it is obvious that Joan was written by a great writer, that doesn't make it a great work. That makes it readable in spite of its faults. In lesser hands, the book would have failed altogether. Think about all the novels that have been written based on historical figures just in the past five years or so -- there's been a positive spate of them -- and then tally up how many you think will still be in print in a hundred years, and how many of them ought to be still in print even in twenty; and you will see what an accomplishment Joan of Arc was. Great fiction rarely springs from great fact.)

Twain is hardly the first author to have stumbled when it came to guessing what his "great" work was. Shakespeare considered his plays hack work; he obviously poured his heart into some of them (Lear comes to mind), but they were still only the business of his life, written to make a living. His real art, and the work that would assure his immortality, was his collection of sonnets. Now, I'm not disrespecting them. They're unlivable-without, and Shakespeare would be remembered today if they were all he'd left behind. But he wouldn't be the household word he is now without his plays. I think of them as wine compared to the brandy of the sonnets: some light and bright and sparkling, some deep and rich and somber; some stimulating, some enervating: of infinite variety. One can drink wine every day, and even at different times of the day. Brandy is too strong, too concentrated, too heady to be taken more than just now and then, and never early (except in case of emergency).

More striking, and I think rather more entertaining, was Arthur Conan Doyle's estimation of his own work. Shakespeare at least seems to have taken some real pleasure in the creation of his plays; Doyle despised his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. He grew so sick of him that he threw him off Reichenbach Falls and was relieved to be done with him, but had to relent and bring him back to life when the outcry from Holmes' admirers became too loud. Holmes was certainly Doyle's hack work. His real work, the work for which he would be remembered and lauded, was: his Professor Challenger novels!

(Loud, mystified outcry from almost everyone reading this: "WHO?")

Exactly. I myself, a Doyle fan from way back (the Holmes stories were some of the first "classic" works I ever read as a kid, which shows you what a lightweight I was), could not get through a Professor Challenger novel. Not even on tape. My husband claims to have enjoyed them, but he does have a certain streak of masochism. I mean, look at who he married.

Speaking of my husband, he pointed out to me that H. G. Wells, another author we both enjoy, thought that his serious social novels would be his great mark on history, as opposed to those fun and fluffy works of science fiction, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine. The reason I don't give you the titles of some of those works Wells thought would be his signature on the page of immortality is that they're extremely extinct and I don't have time to do the kind of research that would turn up their names just now. 'Nuff said.

One thing that really ought to have tipped Twain off to the fact that Joan wasn't going to be his most remembered work is that he once described it as just flowing off his pen. Every first-year writing student knows the old maxim: "easy writing, hard reading." Nine times out of ten, the more effortless the actual writing is, the harder it's going to be for the poor reader to slog through the resulting mess.

Before I touch more on what worked and what didn't in Joan of Arc, I'd like to go into the question I was grappling with even before I started reading the book: namely, why would someone like Twain write a book about Joan of Arc? And not a satirical book, but a straight-faced tribute?

To call Twain irreverent is to call a homeschooling parent's day kinda busy: it's accurate, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. In Tom Sawyer, we see Twain at his lightest and most humorous toward church and clergy:

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod -- and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Later, in Letters From Earth, he minces no words; and his humor (what one can find of it) is of the very darkest hue:

I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos. A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.

Twain had some issues with religion (or at least Christianity), to put it mildly. He raked the Bible over the coals, returned to certain parts of it almost obsessively; wrote and rewrote the stories of Adam and Eve, the Creation, and Satan (of whom Twain wanted to write a biography when he was a child, or so he claimed). He referred to "an Established Church" as "an established crime" and later as "an enemy to human liberty" in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and he seems to have meant it.

So why would he so admire a girl of piety and deep reverence like Joan of Arc?

Well, in spite of all his snarlings about organized religion and the Bible, Twain wasn't an atheist; and though he was troubled by many of the teachings of the Presbyterian church of his childhood, he saved his harshest vitriol for the Catholic church. Joan was a Catholic, and a deeply devout one; but her insistence that her received religious experience outranked any orders from church officials has prompted at least one writer to title her "the first Protestant." Twain admired her strength and her sass in standing up to the Catholic Inquisitors who fired questions at her so relentlessly during her long trial.

Then, too, Twain's real objection was to religion, not the religious. Not the sincerely religious, anyway. He clearly has nothing but loving admiration for Mary in Tom Sawyer, though her biggest role in that book is the chapter in which she patiently coaches Tom on the Bible verses he is supposed to memorize for Sunday school. Mary is genuinely pious and enjoys both church and the lessons that precede it. She is gentle and sincere -- genuinely Christian, if to be a Christian is to be like Christ. Twain admired her sort. It was religious hypocrites -- those who used the Bible to justify what they wanted to do anyway, or who were Christian in name but not in action -- that he despised. So Joan of Arc must have seemed rare and refreshing to him in her deep, absolute, self-sacrificing belief.

Of course, Twain would have had a soft spot for Joan anyway. He could be especially sentimental toward the poor, the innocent, and the young, and like so many writers of his day he tended to idealize women. And he always cheered the underdog.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, past all this, I think that in some ways Twain identified with Joan of Arc. Both were born low on the social scale; both lacked formal education: these circumstances would hardly lead one to believe that these were two people who would one day change the world, as both set out quite deliberately to do. And Twain and Joan are both very much associated with childhood: Joan because she died so young, Twain because in some ways he never grew up (and never wanted to), and because his most famous novels treat of children. And of course both Twain and Joan were driven to shake up the established order.

All that aside, the big question is: Should Mark Twain have taken on Joan of Arc?

It's a little like asking if you should marry someone just because you've fallen in love with them. Fondness, even passion, is no guarantee of compatibility. Sometimes it can be practically a guarantee of just the opposite.

I think Twain got overconfident with this work, and that can be a lethal mistake when it comes to writing. He only set it aside when other matters forced themselves to take priority in his life. If this sounds unimportant, keep in mind his feelings regarding his master work, Huckleberry Finn. "I like it only tolerably well," he wrote to his friend and editor, "and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done." Posterity may be thankful that he only set it aside for several years, hauling it out every now and then to work on. He regained his confidence after two years of leaving it completely along and then looking at it once more.

This setting aside and taking up again marked the process of writing Joan of Arc as well, and it shows. The narrator is rather colorless and occasionally uneven, personality-wise. For instance, we know that he is an old man at the time he is telling the story. Once during the narration, Twain decided to have his main character be a doddering old man, suddenly forgetful of details, groping for words. As the rest of the book, some four hundred pages, is smooth and assured, this is jarring. It's as if Twain couldn't quite decide who his narrator really ought to be; or as if he wanted him to be whatever might be necessary to make whatever point Twain might feel like making at the moment.

Early on in the book, Twain is apparently making an effort to demonstrate how superstitious the villagers Joan grew up with are. He has his narrator describe a dragon that was said to dwell in a forest nearby. This is fine -- or would have been if he'd done it with a straight face, or kept the narrator consistent. Either he was superstitious or he wasn't. But instead Twain has him make a very Twainian point at one moment:

I think there is no sense in forming an opinion when there is no evidence to form it on. If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion.

This is the savvy sort of statement that the time traveler in Connecticut Yankee might have made. But the next minute, this same character goes on to say:

As to that dragon, I always held the belief that its color was gold and without blue, for that has always been the color of dragons. That this dragon lay but a little way within the wood at one time is shown by the fact that Pierre Morel was in there one day and smelt it, and recognized it by the smell.

That's not a consistent follow-up. It's not well done enough to be ironic. I think Twain wanted his character to be the sort of man who would make the latter statement, because that would fit in better with the time and place of which Twain was writing; but he couldn't resist having a little of his own (Twain's, I mean) opinion there. He wasn't able to distance himself from his work. Well, Twain rarely is. Usually, that's a strength of his writing. His passion and humor flow straight from the vein, as it were. But in this book, it's a disadvantage. He's trying to flatten out his voice, because this work isn't supposed to be by Twain; it's supposed to be a translation of someone from another culture and time. (Two separate people told me, on hearing that I was reading Joan of Arc, that they'd read it when they were much younger but hadn't known it was by Twain. Their copies showed only the pseudonym he'd employed. They had both been under the impression that it was genuinely nonfiction -- that is, that the narrator was a real person who'd known Joan of Arc from her childhood and was telling his own story as well as hers.) And so we have none of the satire and none of the humor that mark Twain's great works.

He does make attempts at humor, it's true. He has some passages where someone says something and Joan bursts into merriment, in so many words. My feeling is, if you have to tell us it's funny (which is what you're doing by mentioning that your character is laughing uncontrollably -- look, see! humor!), it probably isn't. Jean Kerr, one of my favorite humor writers (author of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, among other books), said once that "In plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front [i.e. the audience] laugh very little." And so with Twain's writing in this particular book. There were times when I smiled at a fine turn of phrase, but my face took on a positively funereal cast when the characters before me were just rolling on the ground wetting their armor with mirth.

But Twain didn't exactly leave himself much room for his comedic gifts here, did he? This isn't exactly a funny story we're talking about, or one that opens doors even for bleak humor. Joan's life was a great tragic arc, from early triumph to rapid ignominy and horrifying death. What was the great humorist of late nineteenth-century America to do with the great tragedy of early fifteenth-century Europe?

Annette, as I mentioned, believed that this book was supposed to be ironic satire. I firmly disagree, but I wish it had been something like that. Satire was what Twain excelled at. Savaging what he disliked or disagreed with was his great joy, and no one could do it better. (If you want a really good time, please read Twain's essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences." I haven't read a word of Cooper's writing, and this is still one of my favorite pieces. You don't have to have read The Deerslayer to enjoy such gems as "They [the rules governing fiction-writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others." I also appreciate such good advice, from the same essay, as "Use the right word, not its second cousin.") But Twain wrote Joan of Arc as a romance, a tragedy. He was fenced in by facts and by his own love of the main character, and left himself no room to exercise his strengths as a writer.

And what about his weaknesses? He had them, of course. No writer doesn't; the best writers are the ones who know how to work around those weaknesses, or better still employ them in such a way that they appear to be strengths. Twain's weaknesses include a sentimental streak a mile wide, a tendency toward the mawkish when he's touched, and the habit of going on and on just because he feels like it. This last shows up even in his great Huckleberry Finn. I can't be the only reader who writhes and grits her teeth when Twain lets Tom Sawyer take over Jim's escape in the end. Tom insists on doing it in fine romantic style for pages and pages and pages and pages and pages. A little would have gone a long way; a lot went a long way toward making me go gray faster than I already was.

In Joan of Arc, we have the going on and on from chapter 17 to 19 about the ghost. It doesn't ruin the book, but it's dull and tedious to anyone who didn't actually write it, which is most of us. Even some things that were important to the story, such as the great tree of Domremy, seem long-winded and forced.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book, though, is simply that Twain's story is overshadowed by the real thing. That's a hazard of the trade of writing historical fiction. I'm always annoyed when I read a book review in which it's mentioned that the author in question spent just years and years researching this particular person or that particular historical event and then decided to write a novel. I always wish the author had just told us all about the wonderful things he learned in the course of all those studies. Partly, I don't like having to wonder which is fact and which is fabrication while I'm reading; partly my feeling is that if the real story is so compelling, I'd rather have that than someone's interpretation of it. Joan of Arc's own words are so powerful that any fictionalization can only seem shadowy and thin in comparison. If I hadn't read them first, Twain's novel might have seemed stronger. As it was, I wished he'd used his energy elsewhere. He wrote a brief appreciation of Joan, as I mentioned before. I think he should have expanded it, done a piece like his long essay "In Defence [sic] of Harriet Shelley," which was entirely serious, compellingly factual, and allowed plenty of room for Twain's feelings and opinions without detracting from the power of the truth.

But this isn't supposed to be just me yammering on and on about what I think. This was a book group meeting, and so I'd like to let the other members have their say on what they thought of the novel.

Pia simply couldn't get drawn into the book. She had been initially excited when we mentioned what we'd be reading, thinking (understandably) that this would be a biography. Joan was certainly someone she would have liked to know more about, but as a novel this work just didn't do it for her. Pia mentioned that she hasn't read any other Twain, so it wasn't even that she was disappointed with this one in comparison. Several people recommended that she pick up Huckleberry Finn; this may sound silly, but I think that a Twain novice of any age might do better starting with Tom Sawyer or The Prince and the Pauper, and then moving on to Twain's magnum opus.

Patty also wasn't compelled by Joan of Arc. She likes Twain, but this one just didn't do it for her. She, like Pia, wanted to learn more about Joan, but would have preferred something nonfiction.

Theresa didn't expect to like the book, but found herself getting drawn in, mostly from her interest in Joan. She was about a third of the way through the book on the night of our group meeting, and expects to finish it. She was curious as to what Twain's religious upbringing had been. I did a little research and found that his mother was nominally Presbyterian, but also very superstitious -- very much like the Aunt Polly character in Tom Sawyer. His father was described by one Twain biographer as "anticlerical," which may be where Twain got his anti-Catholic streak.

Mary didn't think she'd be too thrilled with the book. She brought it on vacation with her -- almost didn't, since it hardly seemed like a vacation-type read, but then figured what the heck. "What a page-turner!" she exclaimed. Joan's life and personality were very compelling to Mary, especially how Joan followed her passion, come hell or high water. Mary was almost done with the book as of our meeting. She will certainly finish it; but as she pointed out, let's face it, we all know how the story ends.

Annette, who is reading the book side by side with her son Nik, enjoyed it as a social satire. She believes that at the very least Twain was taking every opportunity to take potshots at the church. The dialogue from the trial transcripts (and, unlike the rest of the novel, all of this dialogue is faithful to the surviving court records) that Twain chose to dwell upon and highlight is pretty much everything that made the church and its patriarchs appear in a bad light.

Annette also thinks that the work as a whole is purposely overblown, making fun of the mythologizing of Joan. I don't think so. I don't know why Twain would be making fun of Joan's loyal admirers when the documentary evidence overwhelmingly supports his being among their most enthusiastic numbers. Annette and I had some spirited exchanges on this point. Annette pointed out that satire can be read on many levels; as I had mentioned H. G. Wells earlier in the evening, she mentioned that a book like his War of the Worlds could be read as the social satire Wells intended much of it to be, or the novel could simply be a cool story about invaders from Mars. So with Joan; it could be read merely as a fictionalized biography, but might also be making deeper social statements. Undoubtedly. I just don't think they're the ones she suspects they are. Also, one must remember that to Twain, Joan's life itself was the statement needing to be made. She was young and ardent and innocent and true; pitted against sophistication, wealth, and shrewd Machiavellianism, those qualities will always lose, especially when the individuals possessing the latter belong to an embedded social power structure. And yet there is a moral victory inherent in losing to such enemies. It's just that, given the choice, most of us would prefer physical survival to a triumph like Joan's.

Back to enjoying (or unenjoying) the book itself. What about me? Contrary to almost everything I've said up to this point, I had a perfectly fast and pleasant read. The fast may be owed to Joan's endearingly short chapters, which enable the reader to flip pages at a morale-buildingly brisk rate. But it's always a pleasure to read Twain. At the very least, and at the risk of damning him with faint praise, I'd rather read Twain failing than almost any other writer doing the best they ever can.

I learned so much about Twain and Joan along the way that it may be impossible for me to separate the experience of my side-reading from the perusal of the novel itself; but that's often how it in jumping into a classic. The journey matters more than the destination. I certainly can't regret reading Joan of Arc, or consider the time I spent on it as time wasted. On the other hand, I will point out that unlike so much of Twain's other, better-known writing, there was a complete lack of quotable quotes in this one. That's a shame.

In conclusion: If you want to learn about Joan of Arc herself, read her own words or one of the good nonfiction books about her available. If you want some obscure Twain, I would direct you instead to Pudd'nhead Wilson, which is an underappreciated masterpiece with all the power of Huckleberry Finn, all of its social commentary, and no cute happy ending. But if you've read a great deal of Twain already and are interested in learning more about him and Joan, Joan of Arc may be just the book for you.

And that's all I have to say on the subject.

(For now.)

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