There comes a time each year after the holidays when the parties have died down, the “to do” list has been beaten into temporary submission, and visiting friends and family have, at long last, piled into their cars and headed off into the sunset.
The house is unnaturally quiet. The refrigerator is packed with leftovers. The kitchen table groans with half-eaten desserts.
A cold front descends from the Arctic and makes itself comfortable in the shadow of Blue Mountain. The thermometer camps out in the single digits.
The tea kettle whistles at regular intervals. The wood stove grumbles quietly in the corner.
Conditions are perfect, in other words, for rifling through the old UPS box full of this year’s Christmas presents.
Every year, there are hits and misses. There will always be a dud or two, whether unwitting, as in the case of an international specialty soap gift assortment, or fully witting, as in the fossilized slice of fruit cake that has been redistributed within our family over the years, a kind of metaphor for lame presents generally, and a tip of the hat to the practice of re-gifting, which all of us perennially suspect but lack the solid evidence to prove.
On the other hand, there are often treasures to be found in that long-suffering cardboard box. A small painting by one’s daughter, for instance, of an enormous disturbing nose; a butane-fired soldering iron; a year’s supply of unisex cologne (“Merry Christmas — because you stink!”); and, happily, books.
It often takes me a whole year to read my way through the pile of books I get during the holidays. It’s not that I’m a slow reader. It’s just that my work, whether it be writing fiction or a newspaper column, requires very specific research. I rarely read for pure pleasure the way I did when I was young, before I was cursed with such an impatient and critical eye.
But from time to time, I’ll come across a book that reminds me what it’s like to be swept away by an author.
This year, I was given such a book, a collection of animal-themed passages by one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain (Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, University of California Press, 2009).
I’ve been an admirer of Mark Twain for a long time. In fact, my first published novel, Finn, was a kind of homage to Twain’s literary masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I love Twain for his ferocious sense of humor, his ear for vernacular, and the depth of his understanding — of people, of the American landscape, and of storytelling.
What I didn’t know about him was his whole-hearted devotion to animals. There are glimpses of this in his novels. For instance, in the regret that Huck feels upon killing a bird:
…his body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about, this way and that, like his neck was broke, and there was a little white skin over his eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side of his head, and laws! I couldn’t see nothing more for the tears…
I knew that Twain was a great one for jumping frogs, and all the kinds of critters one might find on a raft trip down the Mississippi. But I didn’t know how passionately he fought for animal rights. He was an early supporter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. His support often took the form of articles and letters written for mass consumption, as in the letter he wrote in 1899 to the London Anti-Vivisection Society, which detailed some of the more horrifying experiments that were suffered upon animals in the name of medical progress.
A common thread runs through his animal writing: man, who considers himself the perfection of species, is actually quite the opposite. Twain imagines what animals must be saying about us behind our backs. Through the eyes of noble horses and pure-hearted dogs, he observes behavior that seems to condemn mankind to the lowest rank of creation. Malice, envy, ambition, cruelty, murder, immodesty, slavery — this is merely a short list of mankind’s singular capacities.
The book isn’t all fire and brimstone. It wouldn’t be Twain if it weren’t hilarious, too. Hilarious and precise, as in this description of a camel:
They have immense, flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie with a slice cut out of it. They are not particular about their diet. They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it.
Before I read Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, I had no idea that Chuck Jones, the great Warner Brothers animator who created the Road Runner cartoons, was indebted to Twain. It turns out that Wile E. Coyote is a direct descendant of the miserable, furtive, and ravenous “cayote” in Roughing It.
Bugs Bunny has Twain in his family tree, too, in the form of a 19th century description of a Western jackrabbit.
“One fateful day,” Jones wrote, “our family moved into a rented house, furnished with a complete set of Mark Twain, and my life changed forever.”
A complete set might be overkill, but please consider a book by Twain the next time you’re stuck for a gift.
Laws! if it don’t beat an assortment of soap.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 January 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
