Review by Edward Tanguay July 14, 1995

The good thing about reading Twain is that you know you are in for some good laughs and some sharp wit. Typical is his often quoted observations about the German language in which he says that German words are not words, but alphabetic processions, etc. He also has a far-side like way of showing you ordinary things from a new angle as he did from a child's angle in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. There is also something very American about Twain. He has the ability to grab portions of American culture and show them to you--sort of a literary Norman Rockwell.

I have read half the book so far and love it. I liked how self-sure Hank Morgan was at the beginning. It's good theatre--a clash of two people living in worlds with each person believing 100% in his own world:

Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse's neck and his long spear pointed straight ahead. I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived.

and Hank doesn't let up:

"Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just on a visit or something like that?" He looked me over stupidly, and said: "Marry, fair sir, me seemeth --" "That will do," I said; "I reckon you are a patient."

Twain's contrast between the languages is also enjoyable, especially Hank's baseball metaphors and other references that the people of 6th century England could have no idea of:

"Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy." "Cowboys?" "Yes; the knights, you know: You were going to tell me about them. A while back, you remember. Figuratively speaking, game's called." "Game --" "Yes, yes, yes! Go to the bat. I mean, get to work on your statistics, and don't burn so much kindling getting your fire started. Tell me about the knights."

The contrast between language is especially strong when they use pieces of each other's vocabulary, for instance Sandy used a phrase of Hanks, something like "hang about" and told him she would add it to her vocabulary. Here's an example of the other way around:

"What is it?" I said. "It is truly a stubborn soul, and endureth long. It is many hours now." "Endureth what?"

Speaking of Sandy, I think she is the most lovable character in the book so far. She is innocently shielded by the customs and beliefs of those days and she can talk on and on without saying anything but her speech is beautiful, Shakespearelike, and you don't mind listening to it. The description of her incessant talk is hilarious:

You couldn't think, where Sandy was. She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city. If she had had a cork she would have been a comfort. But you can't cork that kind; they would die. Her clack was going all day, and you would think something would surely happen to her works, by and by; but no, they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for words. She could grind, and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and never stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the result was just nothing but wind. She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has. She was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber; but just as good as she could be. I hadn't minded her mill that morning, on account of having that hornets' nest of other troubles; but more than once in the afternoon I had to say: "Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all the domestic air, the kingdom will have to go to im- porting it by to-morrow, and it's a low enough treasury without that."

Hank's description of the people is curious. He refers to them often as animals but I also sense some respect for their innocence and simpleness.

It was hard to associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.

Some of the acts described were surprisingly violent and striking to read: the summary killings by the queen, the decay of humanity in the dungeons, the whipping of the woman pilgrim as her husband had to hold her down and turn his head to avoid her blood splattering on his face. These descriptions come without warning (not unlike they probably occur to Hank) and give us the unsettled feeling of gross human rights violations and give depth to these idyllic characters. In a book with a constant strain of light humor, these events seem out of place and shocking. It makes you aware that Twain is doing something else with this book besides entertaining us.

His political messages whether sarcstic, ironic, hidden, or blatant make up one of the strongest themes in this book. I'm not sure I see a consistent reference throughout his criticism. Is he critiquing the feudal government back then (who nobody would defend) or is he symbolically attacking his own government. He has slammed the church a couple times especially in his reference to rulers who do not see a contradiction between praying devoutly and then killing people. An interesting use of vocabulary makes an uncanny future reference to the 1930s:

So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hun- dred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

I liked his comment on the "two reigns of terror" in which he argued that the French Reign of Terror was actually the second reign of terror. The first lasted for the full reign of the kings as they reigned over the poor by using terror in less dramatic and obvious ways. I think of this when I stand in front of beautiful European castles and imagine the human rights violations against the workers who built it and the poor who paid for it and those neglected because of it. In one sense these castles are realizations of culture. In other sense they are monuments to the injustice of the past. With this book, Twain helps us see the underworld of the dark ages, and perhaps that of the 19th century, and even that of our day as well.

Twain's ability to create humor from the simplest of situations makes this book particularly enjoyable to read. An example is when Hank Morgan is riding along in his uncomfortable suit of armor. In our days, for instance, knights have such a mystic aura that to hear one described as clanking along, battling itches he can't scratch and a flies buzzing inside his helmet is funny, and Twain can describe it so well:

Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter in there. You see, the sun was beating down and warming up the iron more and more all the time. Well, when you are hot, that way, every little thing irritates you. When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn't seem to stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn't create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron set- tled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh every minute. And you had to be always changing hands, and passing your spear over to the other foot, it got so irksome for one hand to hold it long at a time. Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes a time when you -- when you -- well, when you itch. You are inside, your hands are outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between. It is not a light thing, let it sound as it may. First it is one place; then another; then some more; and it goes on spreading and spreading, and at last the ter- ritory is all occupied, and nobody can imagine what you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is. And when it had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I could not stand anything more, a fly got in through the bars and settled on my nose, and the bars were stuck and wouldn't work, and I couldn't get the visor up; and I could only shake my head, which was baking hot by this time, and the fly -- well, you know how a fly acts when he has got a certainty -- he only minded the shaking enough to change from nose to lip, and lip to ear, and buzz and buzz all around in there, and keep on lighting and biting, in a way that a person, already so distressed as I was, simply could not stand. So I gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and relieve me of it. Then she emptied the conveniences out of it and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and she poured the rest down inside the armor. One cannot think how refreshing it was. She continued to fetch and pour until I was well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.

And lastly, the unbearable situation with the bugs is classic:

With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind blew, and the wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder it got. Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and things began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down in- side my armor to get warm; and while some of them behaved well enough, and snuggled up amongst my clothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless, uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still, but went on prowling and hunting for they did not know what; especially the ants, which went tickling along in wearisome procession from one end of me to the other by the hour, and are a kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep with again. It would be my advice to persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrash around, because this excites the interest of all the different sorts of animals and makes every last one of them want to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes things worse than they were before, and of course makes you objurgate harder, too, if you can. Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other; there is no real choice. Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse does when he is taking electric treatment. I said I would never wear armor after this trip.

This makes even my memories of the most nightmarish camping trip seem like a night on a waterbed!

Edward Tanguay

*** A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain
*** Second Half (Chapters 23 - end)
*** Review by Edward Tanguay
*** July 21, 1995

Hank has a dry way of dealing with the people. It reminds me of how politicians probably think about the general public today and in Twain's time:

When you are going to do a miracle for an ignorant race, you want to get in every detail that will count; you want to make all the properties impressive to the public eye; you want to make matters comfortable for your head guest; then you can turn yourself loose and play your effects for all they are worth. I know the value of these things, for I know human nature. You can't throw too much style into a miracle. It costs trouble, and work, and sometimes money; but it pays in the end.

The above display political showery makes me think of an article I read of a campaign speech by George Bush at an elemetary school in Pennsylvania. The article focused on the orders that the campaign office sent to the school beforehand describing what props had to be made and set up, including a large picture of a yellow pencil made by the kids reading "The Education President." Campaigns can lead to such showy behavior on the part of politicians. Twain points this out by allowing us to observe the same behavior at another time and in another culture.

The long words that Hank utters in during the incantations are nonsense German words:

When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted -- that always produces a dead hush -- and then slowly pro- nounced this ghastly word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and many women to faint: "Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft!"

This one means, for example: "The Constantinople society for bagpipe makers."

The first incident with the blown up knights and horses (when Hank and the King were traveling around) is quite violent. It seems to be the first violent thing that Hank does. It seems a bit inconsistent with his fight for human rights, but perhaps he's adapting some of their brutal ways:

When they were within fifteen yards, I sent that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under the horses' noses. Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see. It resembled a steamboat explosion on the Mis- sissippi; and during the next fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh.

A cutting analogy to the 19th century slavery:

It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the "poor whites" of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.

The scene with Hank and the King up in the tree kicking the peasants on the head as they crawl up one by one to get them is hilarious:

The king raised himself up and stood; he made a leg ready, and when the comer's head arrived in reach of it there was a dull thud, and down went the man floundering to the ground. There was a wild outbreak of anger below, and the mob swarmed in from all around, and there we were treed, and prison- ers. Another man started up; the bridging bough was detected, and a volunteer started up the tree that furnished the bridge. The king ordered me to play Horatius and keep the bridge. For a while the enemy came thick and fast; but no matter, the head man of each procession always got a buffet that dislodged him as soon as he came in reach. The king's spirits rose, his joy was limitless. He said that if nothing occurred to mar the prospect we should have a beautiful night, for on this line of tactics we could hold the tree against the whole country-side.

The whole adventure is fun to read because it is a constant to and fro of surviving, then all hope lost, then escaping, then all hope lost again, and so on.

The whole scene with the woman being hanged for stealing is poignant. She was being hanged even though she stole out of necessity and had a baby. She holds onto her baby and then pleads to be able to kiss it once more before she is killed.

The scene also shows the rigidity of people's beliefs in the law over emotions. They all felt for her (one killed himself for her sake and another promised to take care of her baby until his dying day) yet they executed her nonetheless.

The whole episode of Clarence describing his idea of having cats become the royalty of nations is not so far off-- remember that picture in the newspapers right after Clinton's election of four photographers crowded around the frightened cat "Socks" in Little Rock? Notice also the hundreds of letters that cat gets a month and the need for its fan club. Beyond that, I like the idea of a cat royalty. A good line of siamese would do the trick--they look royal and mystic enough, and they have the right personality for it. (Notice you couldn't do this with dogs!)

The scene at night as the knights sneak towards the castle and slowly, one by one, touch the electric wires is eerie. It is sinister warfare without sound or fighting:

We crept along on our hands and knees until we were pretty close, and then looked up. Yes, it was a man -- a dim great figure in armor, standing erect, with both hands on the upper wire -- and, of course, there was a smell of burning flesh. Poor fellow, dead as a door-nail, and never knew what hurt him. He stood there like a statue -- no motion about him, ex- cept that his plumes swished about a little in the night wind. We rose up and looked in through the bars of his visor, but couldn't make out whether we knew him or not -- features too dim and shadowed. We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down to the ground where we were. We made out another knight vaguely; he was coming very stealthily, and feeling his way. He was near enough now for us to see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend and step under it and over the lower one. Now he arrived at the first knight -- and started slightly when he discovered him. He stood a moment -- no doubt wondering why the other one didn't move on; then he said, in a low voice, "Why dreamest thou here, good Sir Mar --" then he laid his hand on the corpse's shoulder -- and just uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead. Killed by a dead man, you see -- killed by a dead friend, in fact. There was something awful about it.

* * *

I loved the ending of this book! I didn't want Hank to be a hero because although he had great scientific ideas from the 19th century, he represented a culture that does not have all the answers and whose forceful implementation of its customs and machines and political structures, although helping, don't create a utopia. I think we do not realize it yet, but WE ARE The Boss, Clarence, and the boys sitting in the middle of that heap of dead knights. The nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were the explosives that blew up the knights. Now nuclear weapons are all around us and starting to get into who knows whose hands. We go out to try to help one of them and Sir Meliagraunce (North Korea; Iraq) stabs us. And now we sit and wait . . .

A depressing final note on an excellent book!

Edward Tanguay

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