book reviews

The charm, the wonder of D. H. Lawrence is just this—that you take him or you leave him. For you he is or he is not. He's yours or he isn't. You have a feeling that he never really cared, not about that. I mean that he never really cared about too much vulgar being taken. There was something for which he did care. Caring was strong, a living impulse in him.

On Oct. 19, 1865, the day after he finished the "Jumping Frog" story, Sam Clemens wrote to his brother and sister-in-law that he had at last found his vocation—"seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures." Written across the top of the letter was an afterthought: "P.S. You had better shove this in the stove—for if we strike a bargain I don't want any absurd "literary remains" & "unpublished letters of Mark Twain" published after I am planted." In this lucid moment, just as he was approaching the age of 30, Mark Twain could see both where his heretofore miscellaneous career as typesetter-steamboat pilot-miner-reporter was apparently heading, and what the consequences of such a career might be.

On October 19, 1865, Sam Clemens—nearly 30 years old, in debt, haphazardly employed—wrote a letter to his brother Orion. Encouraged by the completion of his first significant creation, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," Clemens overflowed with occupational reflections: "I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel." He had become a pilot, but preaching was a failure "because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade— i.e., religion. . . . I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor."