In the Beginning, Was the Word

Wow, two in one day. My drive to get books back pre-Woods Hole continues. Another Hesperus amuse bouche finished. This time, The Diary of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain, as unknown as the Hawaiian diaries and equally enjoyable. Even though this one can be read in the length of a TV comedy hour.

Of all people to write the forward, Hesperus chose John Updike. Okay. There is a marked different world view when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Updike points out how shallow and undeveloped Twain's vapid female counterpoints are to his male leads. Okay granted. But in this book, given the time and contemporary buzz of Darwin and emerging psychoanalysis, Eve is portrayed charmingly. She is not the she-devils of Zola. She is stereotypical, but only in a post-feminist decade. She does have some glaring gaps: her only attempt to cook is to throw one of her cherished apples into the fire, fire that she, not "man" discovered. Twain portrays her is consumed by curiosity, a scientist who experiments, but not to the expense of her awe of beauty, and the recognition of worth being defined by something other than usefulness.

Twain's take on the acclimation of one sex to the quirks of the other's is a wondrous filling in of the blanks in Genesis. How did they come to adjust to each other? How did the acclimate to gender based traits? The device of using a dairy to interpret the same events first by Adam, with his world view and then by Eve, is a perfect way to explain away how to this day a man and a woman regard the same thing as polarly different and holding innately different relevance. It is especially clever how they explain the appearance of Cain, and Eve's "crazy" protective stance to something that Adam thinks could be a fish or a kangaroo or a bear without a tail. Even with their consumption with discovering the cause of all things, and documenting a quasi-theorem for all things around them, Adam simplistically believes that Eve found Cain in the forest and goes looking for more of this unknown species; he is jealous of her good luck in finding another one, Abel, after he has searched so far and wide.

I loved Eve's appreciation of beauty, beauty that is so much more valued because it is mysterious. Being someone enamoured of the Moon, her perception on day two of her life: ..."The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme - a very great loss. It breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If only we can get it back again. But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realise that the core and centre of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful ... For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six. I would never go to bed. I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them." Would there be moon glow disturbing my bedchamber this evening.

If one can overlook Updike's imposition of his own more "modern" interpretation of the stance between the sexes and his similar compulsion to belittle religion and project that firmly onto Twain, he does put a publishing reality on the collection. Much like Dickens did with A House to Let, these six stories were reworked over time, given the interest of a paying publisher. That adds to the humor of Eden being Niagara Falls, there being no buffalo in Buffalo and the overall barrenness of Tonawanda. (We New Yorkers are often to ignorant or oblivious to Twain's time in Buffalo -- I ate in this green house when I was visiting the county motor vehicle office out thataway in the 70s -- but at least the final snippet rehashes the absurdity of countermanding the theory of evolution by erecting a statue to Adam in Elmira, commercially assuring a place in history to an otherwise inaccessible, but quaint town. Today, it can claim the fame of Tommy Hilfiger.)

Would that I find a couple more Hesperus hours of humor.