Volume 7, Number 3 · September 8, 1966
Split in Twain
By Marius Bewley
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography
by Justin Kaplan
Simon & Schuster, 424 pp., $7.95
One evening, so the story goes, when Mark Twain was in London he dined out in society with Whistler and Henry James, and the latter, broaching a subject that seemed innocently appropriate for the occasion, inquired: 'Do you know Bret Harte?' 'Yes,' Twain replied, 'I know the son of a bitch.' Justin Kaplan in his new biography of Mark Twain regretfully acknowledges the story may be apocryphal; but even if it is, Twain and James achieve in the exchange that unity in dissimilarity that is often said to characterize the best images of metaphysical poetry.
Review, 3381 words
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