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c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Tom Holland. His new translation of Herodotus’s Histories has just been published by Penguin Classics. Paul Addison is an Honorary Fellow of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor, with Jeremy A Crang, of Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour, May to September 1940 (2010). Alan Allport is writing a social history of the British Army in the Second World War. David Annand is a freelance writer and editor. Bryan Appleyard’s novel Bedford Park was published in April this year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Kindle edition). Diana Athill’s most recent book is Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend. Jonathan Barnes is the author of two novels, The Somnabulist and The Domino Men. Justin Beplate is a lecturer in English at the Université Paris II. Robert Bickers is the author of The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (Penguin). David Bodanis’s history of the Ten Commandments is published by Bloomsbury next year. Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Her Disraeli (1982) was a New York Times bestseller. She is currently writing a book on Queen Victoria. David Cesarani is completing a book for Macmillan on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949. Anthony Daniels is a retired doctor. Richard Davenport-Hines’s study of Profumo’s England, An English Affair, was published earlier this year. P L Dickinson is Clarenceux King of Arms and President of the Society of Genealogists. Patricia Duncker is a novelist and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. Suzi Feay is a literary critic and chair of the judging panel for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Giles FitzHerbert is long since retired from Caracas where he served as ambassador until 1993, at which time Venezuela had not yet changed its name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Allen Lane). Tanya Harrod’s latest book,The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture, won the 2012 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside is published by Fourth Estate. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Sophie Hughes is a freelance writer. Ivan Juritz is studying for a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (Profile). Mary Kenny’s most recent book is Crown and Shamrock – Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy. Her play about Winston Churchill and Michael Collins in 1921, Allegiance, is currently in repertory in Ireland. Jonathan Lee’s Joy was shortlisted for the Encore Award for best second novel. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Lucy Moore is a writer whose most recent book, a biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, was published in May. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Donald Rayfield is currently writing an expanded Russian version of Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia for BSG Press in Moscow. Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII is published by Chatto & Windus. Lawrence Rosen teaches anthropology at Princeton University and law at Columbia University. He is the author of The Culture of Islam and Varieties of Muslim Experience. Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London. Her most recent book, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, was published by Allen Lane in 2009. Dominic Sandbrook’s series Strange Days: Cold War Britain will be on BBC Two this autumn. Joan Smith is co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Panel. Her latest book is The Public Woman. Matthew Sperling writes poetry, fiction and criticism, and is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading. John Sutherland’s A Little History of Literature has just been published by Yale University Press. D J Taylor’s The Windsor Faction was published last month by Chatto. Alex von Tunzelmann is a London-based historian and writer. Her most recent book is Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean. Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival. Blair Worden’s books include The English Civil Wars 1640–1660. Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University. The 4th edition of his Romanticism: An Anthology was published last year. Literary Review | o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 4
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l i t e r a r y l i v e s j ohn s u t h e r l a n d In Full Throat Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 2 Edited by Benjamin Griffin & Harriet Elinor Smith (University of California Press 733pp £29.95) This is the second of what is scheduled to be a three-volume transcript of Mark Twain’s autobiography. When complete, it will comprise only a tiny element in a vast project; so vast, indeed, that one doesn’t know whether to review the results of its efforts or bow down wordlessly in awe. Very simply, the aim of the Mark Twain Project (MTP), which has been rumbling on since the 1960s and is now slowly excreting its product, is to put into print every single word that Twain consigned to paper. He lived a long life in which his pen never stopped moving. To achieve its aim, the project has recruited an army of scholars. Treasure has been garnered from universities, foundations, the American government (via funding proxies) and academic presses. And, of course, there are the academic salaries of the editorial staff – one third of which are routinely earmarked for ‘research’. The MTP certainly qualifies: on American campuses, no research is more thorough. Two questions arise in the mind of the general reader. Is Mark Twain worth this extraordinary investment of scholarly expertise and dollars, or are these Twainians, as Shakespeare says, making ‘the service greater than the god’? And, at the rate it’s going, will any of us be around to see the really interesting bits? On the first question, there is no doubt that Twain is supremely important as a national figure. He made the point himself with the remark, ‘I am not an American, I am the American’; he is as much the emblem of his great country as the bald eagle (but hairier). H L Mencken concurred: Twain was ‘the archetype of Homo Americanus’. But is he, when the chips are down, the best American writer? In Mark Twain:The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens, one of the biographies written to commemorate the 2010 centenary of his death, Jerome Loving pondered the mystery of how Twain could have achieved this eminence with such a small number of great works. Loving is surely correct in claiming that, much enjoyed (and filmed) as the tale is, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is ‘possibly the most overrated work in American literature’. Nor can Loving find any incontrovertibly great plums in the Twain pudding. Play it again, Sam Huckleberry Finn, perhaps; but what about the lame, and belatedly published, second half of that novel? I, for one, am mightily curious to know what the MTP is going to do with the squib entitled 1601. Subtitled ‘Conversation, as it was in the Time of the Tudors’, it portrays Queen Elizabeth presiding over a farting contest between, inter alia, Sir Walter Raleigh and ‘ye famous Shaxpur’. Raleigh wins the competition of the ‘nether throats’ with a mighty thundergust, ‘yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink’. The work was unpublishable in Britain until the liberating Lady Chatterley trial of 1960. As to the second question – MTP longa, vita brevis. At the present rate, the project will be completed decades hence. What new organisations of scholarly knowledge will there be by then? Will the ‘project’, in 2040, look like the proverbial stagecoach on the freeway when it finally reaches its far-off destination? Griping aside, what is one to make of the volume under review? Half of its bulk is apparatus criticus. It’s like a newly constructed building from which they’ve forgotten to remove the scaffolding. But, alas, it’s necessary. There’s so much local, quotidian reference that, without annotation, the book might as well be in Sanskrit. The entries cover the period from 2 April 1906 to 28 February 1907.Twain had taken to dictating at this time. His words were transcribed by an amanuensis, then edited. Parts of the Autobiography were subsequently published. Most of it wasn’t, however. There has been dispute about what was going on in his life in 1906 – little, if any, of which breaks the surface of what we have here; there is not even, unless I’ve missed it, any reference to the white cashmere suit which he began wearing in 1906. For the last four years of his life, Twain wore head to toe white: shirts, overcoats, socks, dressing gown. He was even buried in white. No one knows why. In another of the centenary biographies, Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years, Laura Trombley argues that in these terminal years Twain was in dire straits. He never recovered from the death of his favourite daughter, Susy, in 1896 (she is frequently mentioned here). The death of his beloved wife, Livy, eight years later was a second hammer blow – ‘the disaster of my life’, as he calls it here. Of the two daughters that remained, Clara, the elder, was a second-rate singer with a weakness for concert-room Lotharios (her stage debut is described in this volume – ruefully). Jean, the younger daughter, was afflicted by epilepsy, a condition considered shameful at the time. There are passing references to these women, but nothing at all revealing. In these late years Twain came to rely on Isabel Lyon, his secretary-cum-companion, who was involved in recording and writing o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 5

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This month’s pulpit is written by Tom Holland. His new translation of Herodotus’s Histories has just been published by Penguin Classics. Paul Addison is an Honorary Fellow of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor, with Jeremy A Crang, of Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour, May to September 1940 (2010). Alan Allport is writing a social history of the British Army in the Second World War. David Annand is a freelance writer and editor. Bryan Appleyard’s novel Bedford Park was published in April this year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Kindle edition). Diana Athill’s most recent book is Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend. Jonathan Barnes is the author of two novels, The Somnabulist and The Domino Men. Justin Beplate is a lecturer in English at the Université Paris II. Robert Bickers is the author of The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (Penguin). David Bodanis’s history of the Ten Commandments is published by Bloomsbury next year. Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Her Disraeli (1982) was a New York Times bestseller. She is currently writing a book on Queen Victoria. David Cesarani is completing a book for Macmillan on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949. Anthony Daniels is a retired doctor. Richard Davenport-Hines’s study of Profumo’s England, An English Affair, was published earlier this year. P L Dickinson is Clarenceux King of Arms and President of the Society of Genealogists. Patricia Duncker is a novelist and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. Suzi Feay is a literary critic and chair of the judging panel for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.

Giles FitzHerbert is long since retired from Caracas where he served as ambassador until 1993, at which time Venezuela had not yet changed its name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Allen Lane). Tanya Harrod’s latest book,The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture, won the 2012 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside is published by Fourth Estate. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Sophie Hughes is a freelance writer. Ivan Juritz is studying for a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (Profile). Mary Kenny’s most recent book is Crown and Shamrock – Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy. Her play about Winston Churchill and Michael Collins in 1921, Allegiance, is currently in repertory in Ireland. Jonathan Lee’s Joy was shortlisted for the Encore Award for best second novel. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Lucy Moore is a writer whose most recent book, a biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, was published in May.

Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia Books). Donald Rayfield is currently writing an expanded Russian version of Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia for BSG Press in Moscow. Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Life of Edward VII is published by Chatto & Windus. Lawrence Rosen teaches anthropology at Princeton University and law at Columbia University. He is the author of The Culture of Islam and Varieties of Muslim Experience. Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London. Her most recent book, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, was published by Allen Lane in 2009. Dominic Sandbrook’s series Strange Days: Cold War Britain will be on BBC Two this autumn. Joan Smith is co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Panel. Her latest book is The Public Woman. Matthew Sperling writes poetry, fiction and criticism, and is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading. John Sutherland’s A Little History of Literature has just been published by Yale University Press. D J Taylor’s The Windsor Faction was published last month by Chatto. Alex von Tunzelmann is a London-based historian and writer. Her most recent book is Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean. Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival. Blair Worden’s books include The English Civil Wars 1640–1660. Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University. The 4th edition of his Romanticism: An Anthology was published last year.

Literary Review | o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 4

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