In Orbit too Close to a Star

Our culture celebrates accomplished people, especially accomplished creative artists.  This means many celebrities have more of a "fish-bowl" kind of existence than a personal life and they often require a small army of helpers to meet all of their personal and professional obligations.  These Assistants can start out as an artist's devoted fans or followers but their work and the trust of their employer gives them a view behind the curtain others don't get to see: they know the artist on and off stage, see the creative person as well as his/her public persona.  Whether that is an advantage or disadvantage is explored in Lynn Cullen's novel, Twain's End.

The book is a fictionalization of a real drama that occurred during the last year of Samuel Clemens's (aka Mark Twain's) life.  Over the previous decade, the person who managed his correspondence and everyday responsibilities was a woman named Isabel Lyon.  The writer relied on his secretary so much that Clemens had given her a house close his own and a bedroom in his estate, Stormfield.  When Miss Lyon married the writer's business manager in 1909, Mr. Clemens attended their wedding but before the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, Clemens had fired both of them, on grounds of embezzlement.

Now, this wouldn't have been more than a blip on the radar of Mark Twain scholars if the story had stopped there.  Instead, Clemens then effectively sued his former secretary and forced her to return the  house he had deeded to her years before.  Still not content, he wrote to all their mutual friends, calling Isabel everything except a Child of God and turned more than four hundred pages of his mammoth autobiography (released in 2010) is a vicious attack on her character.  Isabel Lyon Ashcroft denied the charges of theft but never said anything against her former employer, even after his death.  Using Mark Twain's papers and Ms. Lyon's diaries, Lynn Cullen constructs a compelling account of the complex relationship between this celebrity and his assistant that shows what happens when the boundaries between personal and professional relationships crumble.

What happens to celebrated personalities once declining health limits access to their adoring public?  If your guide is the biographies of Twain and Dickens, it seems that the drama and applause the performer craves must be re-created in their homes, either by their nearest and dearest (whose ties are to the real person rather than the performing alter-ego) or by assistants and hand-picked fans and unhealthy rivalries develop between the chosen.  Ms. Cullen's novel suggests that something like this rivalry also occurred in life of Helen Keller, a Twain fan and celebrated personality herself.  Miss Keller's teacher and constant companion, Annie Sullivan married a man who became attracted to her student and a unhealthy rivalry developed between the two woman as well as the husband and wife. In the end, Miss Sullivan's marriage broke from the stress of the twin rivalries. 

Lynn Cullen

It is the rivalries that steer the tension in Twain's End, and the need of isolated souls that keeps the reader coming back for more.   In the end, Miss Cullen's novel transforms the caricatures of famous celebrities back into the people they were before public personas smothered the nuance and subtlety of their human creators.  Behind the performing mask that the public sees is a complex and often fearful human being and humanity can be very appealing.  In the end, that humanity may be what keeps some assistants in orbit around  their stars.

The novel, Twain's End, by Lynn Cullen will be released on October 13, 2015.  I am very grateful to Net Galley for releasing a pre-publication copy to me for this review.  LLG

The Tales of Autumn

Fall is unequivocally here, on the calendar and in the air.  Daytime highs are comfortably lower, nights are longer and the primary religion here has changed to college football.  The leaves are just beginning to turn and fall but there are some early spots of color.  Everything is changing along with the books we're choosing - there's nothing quite like autumn reading.











Perhaps it comes from the years we all spent in school, but autumn is the season when we reach for meaningful books, for stories that bring something with them besides primary characters and plot.  History, both fictional and non-fiction, become more relevant in this season since autumn reminds us that time is passing.  A new generation is starting school, while another has reached maturity and still another is passing on.  After a summer of living in the moment, fall is a good time to reflect on life and to find your place in the scheme of things.  

That doesn't mean autumn tales are lacking in story.  The greatest holiday for stories, Halloween, is in the middle of fall and reams of words surround it.  Everything about Halloween stirs the imagination from elaborate costumes (Come As You're Not Parties)...


 




 ...to the belief that a point of the earth's orbit thins the membrane between life and death until it becomes permeable.   All kinds of things can happen in the world like that and there are stories for every possibility.  There's a reason so many writers love Halloween.  It's a holiday composed of memory and imagination.
 

More than anything, autumn is a time of gathering in, for the harvest and for the soul, a time when an evening's chill can make a good book and a warm fire the best company in the believable world.  Fall may not contain the same verve that drove spring and summer but there's a generosity here that favors and enriches the season.  Here is the welcome of hearth and home and loving friends, real and in fiction.  Enjoy this gold-spangled season and the tales that it offers.  They are wondrous to behold.

Subversive Lit on the Orient Express

Teachers tell us  we have to study the classics in order to understand literary forms.  For tragedy, we look at the works of Shakespeare and the Greeks; for comedy, we read Wilde and Shaw.  Fantasy readers get acquainted with Tolkein and SF fans get a background of Verne, Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke before moving on to the contemporary writers.   All of this sounds like a waste of time to the student who equates "classic" with "boring" and confuses "subversive literature" with subversive political groups.  The truth is that stories earn the "classic" distinction when they are so brilliant and memorable that they are enjoyed and understood by generations of people, and the purpose of subversive fiction is to persuade readers to rethink their assumptions.  Combine those two concepts and you'll find Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  No "who-dun-it" has more twists in the tale.

A bit of background for this classic "closed door" mystery, for anyone who needs it.  The brilliant Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot is traveling from Istanbul to London on the fabulous Orient Express, a luxury passenger train service.  On the morning after the train is stalled by a snow drift, the passenger berthed next door to Poirot is found stabbed to death.   Poirot is asked by the train director he's traveling with to find the murderer before the local police arrive so the innocent passengers can complete their journey without further delay.    Poirot has to remove the few  legitimate clues from a stack of red herrings left behind to determine the improbable truth behind the murder.

Because the door of of the victim's berth's was locked from the inside and the berth's window is open, it looks like the perpetrator left the train after the crime.  The undisturbed snow around the train proves the murderer is still on board.   The passengers whose berths were in the same car as the victim are from various nations and a comparison of their statements shows almost all have alibis.  These factors would have the average reader making erroneous deductions or concluding the crime is "unsolvable". That conclusion (and every expectation) is incorrect.

When most people learn someone has been killed, they automatically sympathize with the deceased.  When they hear the victim died after enduring a dozen stab wounds, the sympathy factor increases.  Poirot subverts that assumption immediately when he identifies the murdered man as a kidnapper responsible for multiple deaths and the ruin of several lives.  The kidnapper escaped justice through legal technicalities and lived under an assumed name on money he extorted from parents.  (Much of Murder on the Orient Express was influenced by the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh's child, including the suicide of the baby's nurse.)  

  

An ordinary reader would look at a train car full of suspects, from different nations and backgrounds, and see a car full of strangers, some of whom should be cleared as suspects.  Poirot upends this vision by seeing the same car full of people but never assumes this diverse group are all strangers.  Instead he asks himself the question "Where else would one find such a diverse collection of people?"  The answer to that question, and the identity of the victim drive Poirot to the solution and a decision on what to tell government authorities, as this assumption is subverted as well.

1rst UK edition

More than eighty years have passed since Poirot made his first steps onto the pages of Murder on the Orient Express.  Since then, the story's been printed in at least seven editions and been through an untold number of printings.  (Amazon offers it in 180 separate formats!) The story's been adapted into a radio program, a video game,  two theatrical movies, a TV film and there's another film adaptation in the works.  It's been parodied and referred to so often that people with no interest in mysteries or Agatha Christie recognize the title and know the story packs a wallop.  Those who have read it understand the appeal: Christie's mystery undercuts every expectation we have and the solution makes us glad we were wrong.   It's a classic mystery and tale of subversion.