Journal #15: Mark Twain (Part I)

"He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can't help himself."

This account of Fenimore Cooper's failure to display believable dialogue was the prelude to an example that made me laugh my butt off as I read it. In Literary Offences, Twain cites a passage from Cooper's Deerslayer in which the main character spews a ridiculously overdone, poetic description of nature personified. The character is saying that his "sweetheart" is nature, basically... all metaphor like, in a scene that makes me picture a dramatic stopping of time, with sudden sunbeams on the character and perhaps angels' voices singing in harmony... when in the rest of the story, the same character says things like
"It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a fri'nd."

This attack on phony and inconsistent dialogue struck me so funny because it's something that I've naturally taken notice of in reading, and that when it's done on the contrary, I am immensely impressed by it. There are authors who have an ear, and a knack for such a thing. Twain is one of the best, and therefore has every right to deride Cooper for his lack of it. I've never read Cooper, but I'm guessing if I did, I wouldn't believe in his characters if they are as schizophrenic as Twain has suggested.

If a story starts with a kid yelling "Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs!" it can't very well shift from first to fifth gear and suddenly present us with remarkably blue lakes that behoove tourists to visit, and little Swiss pensions of elder days. Luckily, Stephen Crane stays true to voice and character in Maggie, and so does Henry James in Daisy Miller. If the dialects or tones of each piece were awkwardly intertwined, the reader would be confused.
The best writing is the believable kind. Whether fiction or nonfiction, the reader has to believe that the characters are genuine. Even if a story has no actual quoted dialogue, the narrator must be consistent.