John Freeman

Few American writers created themselves quite so vigorously as Mark Twain. "I ran away," he wrote in "Life on the Mississippi," "I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory." Of course, things weren’t so simple on the boat. Twain "got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerk." Packed to the gills on a slow trip downriver, the novelist was, in a deeper sense, alone.

Holly Mattox, the twenty-something poet of Carol Muske-Dukes’ winning new roman a clef, has a similar experience in 1970s New York. A Twin Cities native with a busy young doctor husband, good intentions and a burning flame of poetic talent, Holly is determined to right the world’s injustices. And yet all the fellow activists at the Women’s Bail Fund receive her with hardened looks and sneers at her supposed naiveté.

"Channeling Mark Twain" tells of how Holly overcomes this judgment (and the creeps and snipes of New York’s literary universe) to turn a poetry workshop she runs out at Riker’s Island Prison into a powerful form of testimony—for the inmates and for herself.

Muske-Dukes taught such a class for nearly a decade in the 1970s, and she has taken good notes. The stagnant, poisonous atmosphere of women penned up just under the flight plan of JFK comes to life on her pages, as do the cast of women who take Holly’s class.

There’s a transsexual who cannot handle confrontation, and a Muslim convert known to have gone down in a blaze of bullets. One woman preys nearly constantly, while another talks out of a face rearranged by the back of a knife. Most of them have pimps on the outside. At the forefront of this class is a mysterious older woman who claims to be the great granddaughter of Twain himself.

"Channeling Mark Twain" humorously describes the clash of personalities and cultures when a white, well-to-do young poet tries to channel this group’s creative energies. While Holly tries to teach inmates about the inner workings of a sonnet, they in turn school her on the reality of a justice system on the verge of breaking down.

Gradually, the inmates take to the creative outlet, and Muske-Dukes starts slipping poems by them into the book. A terrific poet in her own right, she allows the inmates the eloquence that comes from hardened experience. "In God We Trust," runs one of their poems about going to court. "I pray hard to this/God. Why don’t these people look in my eyes?"

In the midst of it all—her relationship faltering, her sense of self fading—Holly is trying to compose poems as well. Muske-Dukes includes Holly’s searching efforts, too, which form a kind of autobiography. "My mother and father came from the Red River Valley," Holly writes in one, "where the river flows, perversely [against geographic expectation] straight north."

You might say Muske-Dukes swims against expectation here too. In a publishing environment enraptured with the memoir she has demurred by writing a novel. Not that "Channeling Mark Twain" is without period pleasures. The book is littered with actual writers, from Joseph Brodsky to Derek Walcott. A poetry editor with his eye on Holly is clearly drawn from the figure of a well-known New York editor.

But by writing a novel, not a memoir, Muske-Dukes wisely invokes the rules and regulations Twain applied to himself when traveling the Mississippi. She can pick up and claim as experience whatever she chooses. She can enter and live out the lives of others. In short, she can straddle two planes—the real and the imagined—a luxury of which the imprisoned women at the heart of this sad, but true little book can only dream.

"Channeling Mark Twain"

By Carol Muske-Dukes

Random House, $23.95, 242 pages

(2007-08-28)

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