WHY I TELL TWAIN
© 2021 By Steve Daut
After I had been telling stories for a few years, I decided to tell “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, a Mark Twain story that my mom used to read to me when I was a kid. I quickly realized that the original version would be a challenge for me. It was a frame story, with a long introduction that didn’t really seem to contribute to the story, and there were some logical gaps that I felt would throw an audience out of the story. The story also contained slang and expressions that could never roll off my tongue, and would likely be incomprehensible to a modern audience. Yet the guts of story itself were as charming as I remembered from my childhood.
So I adapted it. And every time I told it, my introduction went something like this: “This is my adaptation of one of Mark Twain’s most famous stories. Some of the words are Twain’s, some of them are my own, but in this adaptation, I have tried to stay loyal to the tone of Twain’s story. Note that I’m not a re-enactor. I’m not trying to be Mark Twain. Hal Holbrook did that better than I ever could. I am a storyteller, and this telling is about the story, not the iconic figure of Mark Twain.”
Frankly, I adapt stories that I write myself in much the same way. In my process, I generally write a story first, then I learn it as written, let it set for a couple of days, and they try telling it out loud. If you work this way, you know that things that sound good on paper don’t always sound natural when you say them out loud. So, after I get the sound of it right, I rewrite it with the words that naturally come out of my mouth, trying to keep the same tone and style as the writing. I apply this same process of learning the written version, letting it percolate, and then verbalizing it, to the Twain stories I tell. Often many of the words are exactly as written, while others evolve, as long as the style and cadence are consistent.
My ideas about this have also evolved a bit as I began to tell more and more of Twain’s stories, but let’s break this down a bit. What is my goal in all this? Am I just stealing someone else’s work to enhance my own storytelling career? How can I presume to improve upon stories written by the Classic American Writer, Mark Twain?
First of all, this work is an homage to Twain’s writing – not the iconic gentleman in the white suit and the big mustache, but the stories themselves. As I began to research the whole body of his work and look at the life of the man behind the icon, Samuel Clemmons, I began to realize that as a writer, his works are deeper and wider than I had ever imagined. Toward the end of his life, Clemmons came to resent the Mark Twain image he had so carefully crafted. He was a bit like a modern-day actor who gets stuck in a role and is forever defined by that role – think Loretta Switt as Hot Lips in M.A.S.H. Because people expected his writing to be in the “Mark Twain” style, he was frustrated that when his work didn’t fit that mold, it didn’t achieve the broad popularity of his more iconic writing. For example, toward the end of his life when asked what his best book was, he replied “Joan of Arc”. I never knew Twain wrote a book about Joan of Arc, did you? The book is a pretty good model for the best historical novels written today.
Today, having done a lot of research and more than a couple of concerts, my goal is this: I want to make Twain’s work accessible to a modern audience, sparking enough interest in his work for people to delve into it more deeply. The best way I can do that is to tell the stories in a way that fits my style and is easy for a modern audience to grasp and enjoy. In my book and presentation, both called “Telling Twain”, I try to give the historical context, tell a little about Twain’s life, and a bit about the ways I have adapted the stories to bring them to life. One of the best compliments I have ever received was from a reviewer who stated that she never “got” Twain before, but when she heard the Frog story, she loved it. Perfect!
Am I stealing his work? Well, in the first place, everything I tell was published well before 1923, so it’s solidly in the public domain. It’s fair game to create derivative works, which is what my adaptations are, from a legal standpoint. What about morally? Twain’s work was ripped off many times during his life, so is it fair to continue the process beyond his grave? All I can say is that if I can rekindle interest in Twain’s original works and get people to take a second look at the incredible breadth and range of his writings, I feel that I’m honoring him. There is so much richness to be found in looking beyond the icon to the work itself. I, for one, have learned much about storytelling by studying this particular Master.
Finally, I do not presume to improve upon his stories. I simply try to find the core of the story and work with that, as I do with every story I tell, whether it is a folk tale or an original story. And then I try to get rid of everything that doesn’t serve that story core, or that takes a listener out of the story because it is inconsistent or incomprehensible in some way. For instance, when I tell the story “My Watch”, I realized that younger audiences have no concept of a watch that has to be wound up and set. So I add some words about how “back in the day”, you had to ask the watchmaker for the exact time because there weren’t any satellites, and how no self-respecting watch would hide in a telephone. This is not an improvement on the original, but simply a way to help make the original more accessible in an age with technology that was never dreamt of when the story was first published 150 years ago. I just try to do it in a way that is consistent with the style and voice of the man who brought us these wonderful stories that are so much a part of our American literary heritage.
After all, as the Russian folktale about the Three Dolls tells us, every storyteller put his or her own twist on the stories they tell. From my point of view, there are two options to telling literary stories, assuming that the story is in the public domain, or you have permission from the author (or the author’s estate). The first is to memorize every word as it was written, if it fits your style and you can bring it to life with those words. At that point, it is, for instance, “The Tell-Tale Heart, as written by Edgar Allan Poe”. The second way is to adapt it to your style as something you can bring to life, at which point you announce the story as “My adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart, originally written by Edgar Allan Poe”. As long as you make it clear which approach you are taking, I feel that the work, and the author, is being honored.
Steve Daut has been telling stories in various forms ever since the dog ate his homework. He has been performing in various venues for over 35 years. Onstage credits include magic, sketch and stand-up comedy, improvisation, storytelling, and MC work. Writing credits include produced plays, various articles, an early book of short stories, a recent non-fiction book titled Buddha Science, and his book of story adaptations entitled Telling Twain.. Learn more about his story work here: https://www.stevedaut.com
