Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad

An article in The New Yorker about Mark Twain sent me to the bedroom bookshelves to see what I had. Tom Sawyer was too big a volume for outdoor reading and A Life on the Mississippi or A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur too decayed to be disturbed. The article characterised America as half-grown, like Huck Finn. I chose The Innocents Abroad. 

Innocents Abroad were innocents indeed. Or Mark Twain is a careless showman feeding an eager audience. My undated, pirated edition from London, a pinched hardback look, tight print occasionally blurry, especially at the bottom of the page. The innocents, rich enough to pay a thousand dollars for this bash into the unknown: over the bumpy Atlantic, stopping at the Azores, and then Gibraltar, Tangiers, France, Italy, a disparate group constantly off on side-trips to Paris, London or Switzerland, reconvening in Genoa, on to Rome. 

I watched The Talented Mr Ripley the other night: more innocents abroad, rich innocents. Wealth does bring a kind of innocence; there's so much you don't see when you're rich. You travel under R, and that's just the beginning of the false pretences.

I enjoyed Mark Twain at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at Versailles, where he marvelled at the precision that made up the general effect of the clipped trees. Then he's on to Milan, gazing at The Last Supper, telling his readers what they're supposed to think and undermining them. He's a digester of culture; as he raises a masterpiece he drops it.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand—and more especially I cannot understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depôts and such marvels of turnpikes. Why, these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line as smooth as a floor, and as white as snow.

 Then Venice. 

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they battled ... the Autocrat of Commerce ... Mother of Republics ...

He stayed at the Grand Hotel d'Europe. The talented Mr Ripley rents a palazzo. Then Rome. Mark Twain is a digester. Reader's Digest. We last see Mr Ripley on a boat to Greece, travelling under R.

patricia highsmith

What if Patricia Highsmith had written a spare trilogy about her growing up, as Tove Ditlevsen did, instead of these thriller tortures, these chilly people she has to invent in places she has visited, like Venice, Sorrento, Athens and Crete for The Talented Mr Ripley and The Two Faces of January?

Why does Patricia Highsmith need to invent psychotics abroad, while Tove Ditlevsen stays at home—call it that—and has not read Freud?

I would like to read three slim volumes on thick chalky paper written by Patricia Highsmith about growing up in Texas in the 1920s and 30s. Her diaries, all 8,000 pages of them, are due to be published next year. Beside that complex flood, the novels may start to look slim.

What a film has to do to render a person's interiority. The actor's face has to answer for most of it. I have been re-reading The Talented Mr Ripley after re-viewing the film. Books are better at rendering psychosis. The absolute flatness and purity of it, the certainty. In a film two men have to fight as they play and play as they fight. Later there has to be an argument for one to be inflamed enough to kill the other. In a book it comes out of nowhere, no argument, no reason, no premeditation. From then on you know you have entered an abyss. In the film you have rumbles and nudges. Matt Damon stares at Jude Law in the train, learning how to be him. The second half of the film, and the book, is Tom Ripley as Dickie Greenleaf, keeping Tom Ripley in reserve till he's allowed out again.

Yet he felt absolutely confident he would not make a mistake. It gave his existence a peculiar, delicious atmosphere of purity, like that, Tom thought, which a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be better played by anyone else. He was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made.