Subject: (urth) Short Story 217*: A Visit From His Confidant

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 16:21:49 +0000

#A VISIT FROM HIS CONFIDANT

“A Visit From His Confidant” appeared in the *Readercon 22* convention
booklet in 2011.  Mark Twain was the memorial guest of honor.

##SUMMARY:

The narrator awakens in a different room than the one in which he went to
sleep, dressed in a smoking jacket and finding himself in a library much
more sparsely filled than his own.  Soon he notices what he takes to be a
floating brown caterpillar, which greets him in dialect.  The narrator soon
recognizes it as Mark Twain’s talking mustache. The mustache acknowledges
its primary reason for coming to see our speaker is the mustache on his own
face (thus, of course, we have our narrator as Gene Wolfe). In their
conversation, Wolfe is categorized as neither a brave nor entirely good
man, but a reliable one no worse than most men.
He admits he won’t be attending Readercon in Boston because of his wife,
but the mustache cuts him off and says “We don’t speak of ?em here.  ?No”
is good enough for us, an? what’s more n? good enough is over much.  You’re
not goin?, an? that’s settled.  Or else you are, an that’s better. Mark’s
goin?,too.  You tell “em Mark’s a reader.” Wolfe balks, insisting that
Twain is a great writer, but the mustache insists he read much more than he
wrote. The topic of the book Joan of Arc comes up, and Wolfe asserts Twain
thought it his best.

The mustache insists it is talking of an older manuscript which Twain read
and lost, then, inspired by it, determined to write a better one when he
had the chance. The mustache further insists that Twain learned not only
through doing, but by reading stacks of books to achieve understanding.
Wolfe asserts that he must have read a lot of Cooper to write “Fennimore
Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”

They then move on to discuss Twain’s defense of Harriet Shelley, with Wolfe
playing devil’s advocate for Pierce Shelley,  saying that certainly his
unconventional views towards marriage should have been considered.  The
mustache then dismantles moral relativism by asking Wolfe if Wolfe's
bicycle was ever stolen, and if his lack of precautions justified the
theft, then draws the same situation forward to his car.

Twain’s mustache then says that Twain lost a wife and a daughter, and it
made him bitter, but ultimately sympathetic to women like Joan of Arc and
Harriet Shelley. Wolfe says he will tell the fans at Readercon that “Mark
Twain was a wise man and a learned man.  Better than both, he was a man who
thought.  Men who think go wrong at times.  Men who don’t, never go wrong
because they don’t go at all.”

The mustache condemns them as going wrong anyways. He concludes by saying
Twain only had a grammar school education and read because he was
apprenticed to a printer.  Wolfe assures the mustache that he can be relied
upon to relate all of these facts.

##COMMENTARY:

As a short write up for Readercon 22 which featured Mark Twain as a
memorial guest of honor, it seems that Wolfe wants to highlight a few of
Twain’s more serious but less well-known literary efforts.  He acknowledges
the research and dedication Twain brought to his rather uncharacteristic
late in life work on Joan of Arc, which Twain regarded as his best, even
though it has been subject to very mixed critical reviews.  The emphasis on
Twain as a reader, as a serious critic, and as a literary historian
dedicated to research who acquired his love for reading through a printing
apprenticeship is unambiguously Wolfe’s main point. He selects less well
known features, eschewing mention of Twain’s time on a steamboat or his
comic novels and instead opting to explore his critical position and his
historical writing. Wolfe’s other purpose is of course a rather didactic
excoriation of modernity, with barbs criticizing modern education, implying
that the apprenticeship to a printer and simply thinking is ultimately more
productive than higher education might be.  (Wolfe jokes that grammar
schools are no longer so called because they do not in fact teach grammar
there, etc.)

The works mentioned by the mustache include the dismantling of James
Fennimore Cooper, which , after setting forth how Cooper violated 18 of the
19 or 22 rules of literary art governing romantic fiction, concludes with
this gem:

>I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that "Deerslayer" is not a work
of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every
detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me
that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary delirium tremens.

>A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or
result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality;
its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove
that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its
humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh!
indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the
language.

>Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
(Twain)

While this is a light piece, it definitely resonates with some of Harold
Bloom’s ideas of misprision: Twain reads a book on Joan of Arc that
obsesses him so much that he must struggle with it, do his own research,
and create a different final product. Bloom usually characterizes this
process as creative misprision. It seems Wolfe went through much the same
developmental pattern with Jack Vance’s *Dying Earth* series and *The Book
of the New Sun*.

Wolfe (as writer) also casts some barbs at moral relativism, insinuating
that some truths and rights are universal, and further implies, using
Twain’s mustache as his mouthpiece, that Twain’s criticism of Shelley for
abandoning his first wife were justified, though perhaps steeped in
likeable rhetoric serving to ingratiate his audience. In the final analysis
the portrait, while lighthearted, paints Twain as a serious reader. The
ironic distance between Wolfe defending Shelley and the mustache defeating
him so easily in an argument is typical of the ironic distance between the
narrator’s position and Wolfe the writer’s stance, similarly separated from
the Gene Wolfe character just as it was in “The Last Thrilling Wonder
Story.”

##CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

Much as his earlier critiques of the established educational system, such
as his introduction to *Endangered Species* as well as his foray into
fictionalizing scholars such as “Civis Laputus Sum” and “Morning Glory”,
this one highlights the more important status of readers and writers. The
off screen implication of Rosemary’s health problems and the silence the
mustache invokes are probably as close as Wolfe can come in a
pseudo-fiction to a real life exploration of the effect of caring for
someone with Alzheimers .  The stance, as in his more typical fictional
efforts, is once again “enough said”. The concept that it is better to have
a wrong opinion and express that belief than to have none at all and do
nothing seems to be an apologia for Twain and perhaps for many modern
figures as well.

Just as in “Redbeard”, the rather traditional morality espoused by the
narrative is set contrary to the Gene Wolfe surrogate, our narrators in
each story. This ironic tone is here set up by the mustache’s superior
rhetoric.  This distance between the “correct” ethical attitude and the
narrator’s viewpoint is a hallmark of Wolfe throughout his entire career,
but we can often still determine the "triumphant" side.  In his most
complex works, Wolfe gives the adversarial position an extremely compelling
argument (as is the case when Thecla discusses the impossible promise of
religion: that a compassionate God would forgive everything when the chance
for a choice existed and refuse to act within Creation, but damn forever
once life is past and suddenly exert an ultimate, irreversible influence on
cosmology).
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