|
 Weather
is not just a British preoccupation. American author Mark Twain
wrote about the vagaries of New England's climate. Doctorate student
at Oxford
University's English Faculty, Alexis Haynes, explains his love-hate
relationship with the elements.
"Weather," wrote
Mark Twain in 1892, "is a literary speciality, and no untrained
hand can turn out a good article of it." And so, in 'The American
Claimant', Twain modestly defers to the experts and appends to the
book a series of quotations about the weather. The reader is invited
to "help himself from time to time as he goes along."
Twain's reluctance to talk
about the weather is hardly surprising, because in America the weather
is nothing if not variable.
In New England that "Sumptuous
variety ... compels the stranger's admiration - and regret."
And Twain ruefully notes that the weather is always doing something,
always trying new ways in which to make its victims uncomfortable.
 In
a country like the USA obsessed with the mechanical predictability
of the production line, this changeability is the sign of poor craftsmanship.
Twain describes it as the work of "Raw apprentices in the Weather
Clerk's factory," who work out their novitiate in New England.
Though they are by nature
'patient and forbearing', the New England inhabitants remain sensitive
about their weather's shortcomings. And according to Twain, "Every
year, they kill a lot of poets", for daring to write about
the 'Beautiful Springs' that occur elsewhere.
In 'A Tramp Abroad', an account
of Twain's walking tour across Europe in the late 1870s, he discovers
that the European weather is more reliable, on the stage if nowhere
else.
For one theatre production
'mimic rain', as Twain calls it, is provided by a carefully arranged
network of pipes and tubes. It is artificially produced and tamed
to the requirements of grand opera. And like the singers, it needs
to be able to follow a musical score.
But even if the mechanics
have finally been brought under control, the monarchs have not,
and the weather is still reliant upon the whims of princes. After
one particular production, when the king calls for an encore, the
cast are nearly drowned in the Biblical deluge that follows. A further
encore is only narrowly avoided.
There is one consolation
though. Attending a bombastic production of 'King Lear' in England,
Mark Twain cannot make out what the actors are yelling at each other.
But the storm appears on cue and the writer takes comfort in the
atmospheric Esperanto of the weather. "At least," he says,
"it thunders in English."
Related links:
Weather in Literature:
The Modern Novel
Shakespearean Storms
Thomas Hardy
The Romantic Poets
Mark Twain
Daniel Defoe
Oxford University's
English Faculty
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