The Portable Mark Twain by Mark Twain Read Free Book Online

task to name things, but Eve beats him to the punch every time, simply because she knows the right name for every beast and bird. She also knows that Sunday is a day of rest, whereas Adam thought every day was. Thereafter, his diary for Sunday is always the same: “Pulled through.” Eve puts up signs everywhere—“Keep off the grass.” “This way to the Whirlpool.”—and believes Eden would make a swell summer resort.
    Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden, but not for eating of the apple. The forbidden fruit, it turns out, is the “chestnut.” Adam partook of this fruit in the form of a hackneyed joke he told, as old as creation, and he compounded the felony by laughing himself silly over it. Many years earlier, in The Innocents Abroad, Twain stood at the Tomb of Adam and tearfully lamented that the old man had not lived to see him, “his child.” In “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” Twain re-imagines his ancestor as one who has discovered a hairless and toothless creature he can’t quite identify. Eve has instinctively named it Abel. Adam supposes it might be a fish and throws it in the water. Eve retrieves it. It might be a frog, a bird, or a snake; but it isn’t. He decides it is “either an enigma or some kind of bug.” He becomes so convinced that it is a kangaroo that he names it “Kangaroorum Adamiensis.” He rejects that hypothesis and concludes it must be a “zoological freak,” either that or a tail-less bear. Adam wears himself out looking for another specimen of the species; meanwhile Eve has caught another one and named it Cain.
    There is preposterous and affecting comedy in these, our first parents, trying to discover where babies come from and establishing themselves, without benefit of consultation or clergy, as the first family. Driven from the Garden, Adam and Eve discover in a new and apparently unsponsored world the lasting pleasures of one another’s company. “After all these years,” says Adam, “I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. . . . Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit.” If an old joke brought about the Fall, it appears that Adam and Eve have had the last (and the first) laugh.
    In his old age, Twain’s once hopeful optimism may have reached the end of its tether, but, for forty years and more, the imaginative reach of his humor had traveled far and wide—from the Nevada Territory to the Black Forest, from Plymouth Rock to the Rock of Gibraltar, from the outer reaches of the universe to the inner life of microbes, from the creation to the hereafter. Through it all, in multiple personae and in unequal doses to be sure, his antic geniality, his irascible sympathy and self-righteous indignation, his zany irreverence, and ridiculous solemnity traveled with him. The ebullient humor and amiable presence of Twain can be felt on nearly every page of his best work and remain, perhaps, his most important and durable features. Those qualities are good companions, and portable indeed.

Suggestions for Further Reading
    The sheer volume of criticism and scholarship concerning Mark Twain’s life and writings is immense. The bibliography below is meant to list resources for reliable information about the author and his work, identify certain collections or editions of Twain’s writings that may be of interest but not generally known, and to indicate the range of interpretive approaches to his work, particularly Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Under the general editorship of Robert Hirst, The Mark Twain Project has prepared and continues to prepare authoritative texts of Twain’s notebooks, travel narratives, short fiction, novels, letters, and unpublished writings. These texts are published by