A C O R N U C O P I A O F T W A I N
The Oxford Mark Twain
29 volumes, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Oxford University Press
$395.00 (also available individually)
Most initially striking, to the casual Twain reader looking over and over and over this four-foot pile o' Twain, are the illustrations. Readers familiar only with mass paperback editions may not be aware that most of Twain's books were lavishly illustrated, and Twain himself took considerable interest in the pictures that accompanied his text. Some of them are extraordinary: Twain's dark tale of miscegenation and mistaken identity, "Puddn'head Wilson," for example, features as many as four marginal illustrations per double page, giving the work an almost comic book-like feeling. The exact reproduction of Twain's pages gives the reader a sense of historical authenticity -- although that sense is limited by Oxford's decision, no doubt motivated by financial concerns, not to reproduce the beautiful original covers in color. The magenta-framed covers, each bearing a different illustration, that Oxford settled on are solid but not spectacular. Inevitably, infelicities attend a project that follows faithfully in the publishing footsteps of Mark Twain, who recycled material and released thrown-together books to make a quick buck. Some minor works appear several times. Slightly more troubling, at least from a scholarly viewpoint, are the occasional editorial inconsistencies and omissions. Because Oxford restricted itself to material published during Twain's lifetime, several major works have been left out, including "The Mysterious Stranger," "Mark Twain's Burlesque Autobiography" and "Sketches #1." My own personal pet peeve: I couldn't find the second of his anti-James Fenimore Cooper rants. I think it's even funnier than the first, but it wasn't published in his lifetime, so it's out. The attention-getter of the edition, aside from its scope, is the celebrity introductions to the individual volumes, in which well-known writers ranging from Toni Morrison to Arthur Miller to Cynthia Ozick weigh in on Twain. Most of these are stimulating, and some are superb: Roy Blount Jr. imitates Twain deliciously, E.L. Doctorow writes lyrically and insightfully, Miller is in fine form and Morrison brings some fresh insight to "Huck Finn," to choose only four. The afterwords, by famous and not-so-famous Twain scholars, are also useful, although -- again inevitably -- there is a lot of repetition. Even a life as rich as Twain's can only be discussed so many times before the same events start popping up again and again. Still, the reader who braves all the afterwords and introductions will learn a lot about Twain and his world. Should you buy it? The Oxford edition is essentially going against two competitors: The Library of America's five-volume set and the more than 20 volumes published by Berkeley's Mark Twain Project and available through the University of California Press. Each of the three has its points. The Library of America collection is compact and includes the major works (as well, oddly, as "Joan of Arc"), and its two volumes of "Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays" brings much of the good stuff of Twain's shorter works conveniently together. But the books are unillustrated. The beautiful UC Press editions are the most authoritative; unlike Oxford's, they contain detailed page-by-page textual notes (in much of Twain's work, and particularly in a work like "Roughing It," these are of far more than scholarly interest). They also offer a big selection of Twain's extraordinary letters, which are essential to a serious understanding of the man. But the same scholarly rigor that makes these the definitive editions means they are produced slowly, and so there are still major omissions: "Life on the Mississippi" hasn't appeared yet, for example. As for Oxford, it offers relative comprehensiveness, illustrations, some great introductions and the virtue and interest of facsimile. The average reader may not really need 29 volumes of Twain -- and let's face it, there's some pretty mediocre stuff in there -- but he or she might want 15 or so, and by the time you figure out the price break on the set, it might be worth buying the whole damn thing and devoting some bookshelf space to such non-immortals as "Merry Tales" and "The American Claimant." Or, you can pick and choose -- a little UC Press, a little Library of America, a little Oxford.
|
he mammoth new Oxford Mark Twain collection makes a big and valuable splash in the already teeming sea of Twain publishing. These 29 hardback volumes, facsimile editions of works published during Twain's lifetime, make much of his vast oeuvre available to the modern reader in something fairly close to how it looked to his contemporaries.