Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

I would have to call this book a two-fer. You have a historical novel, accurate in its facts about the subject, Joan of Arc, delivered by a masterful story teller, Mark Twain. It was the last book of Twain’s published while he lived, and he considered it his best work.  Who am I to argue with Samuel Clemens?  It is remarkable that this book is not better known.  I had no idea until a few weeks ago that he had written such a book.  I had bought a two volume set of Mark Twain’s work in the early 70s.  In my memory it was the complete works of Mark Twain so I thought I had read all he had written.  When I went to my book case it is actually titled The Family Mark Twain and it runs close to 1500 pages.  I also have the Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain which runs to 700 pages.  None of the 3 volumes has this novel.

To me, it is amazing that he would spend 12 years researching this subject before he sat down to write the book.  This stems from my having never quite figured out Twain’s religious beliefs, I am not sure he ever did himself.  I do know that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and that he had an abhorrence for organized religion. His novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is in many ways a long condemnation of the Catholic Church.  Agnostic, atheist, theist, I have not been able to put Mark Twain in any camp. So why would he spend so much time and energy to write a novel about what is essentially a historical religious figure? Perhaps if there is an afterlife and I run into to him, I will ask him that very question.

This book is a biography of the life of Joan of Arc, but it is also a historical novel.  It is written in the first person narrative mode, with the narrator being a childhood companion and later her secretary/scribe during her campaign to expel the English from France.   As such Mark Twain took certain liberties to keep the story moving, interesting and occasionally even humorous. However all the facts about Joan of Arc are true with much of the information taken from the sworn testimony of the many ecclesiastical trials she endured in her short lifetime.

I had read a biography of Joan of Arc before, and I do not remember being particular enriched by the  experience.  I had read that book shortly after reading Karen Armstrong’s A Spiral Staircase.  Armstrong is a remarkable – and prolific – religious scholar. A Spiral Staircase is her memoir of how she came to be in a convent, and how she came to not be in a convent.  Essentially from an early age Armstrong was having religious visions that lead her to follow the path of seeking to be a nun.  As it turned out she had a form of epilepsy that was giving her these visions. Once her epilepsy was treated, her visions went away. I placed Joan of Arc in the same category, as having a form of religious epilepsy.

From the first biography I did not have a clear understanding of why Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a heretic and possibly as a witch.  All that became very clear with Twain’s book. She was essentially condemned by a French ecclesiastical court under English control.  The English wanted her dead, but did not want to make a martyr out of her.  They failed in preventing her martyrdom. There were 3 or possibly 4 trials, in all of which Joan held her own, without the benefit of counsel, while being kept chained in a dungeon between court sessions, against a bank of 60 or more religious judges, handpicked for their preference for the English.  This stacked court only managed to condemn her in the end by the lowest form of trickery.  It was interesting to me that one of the primary charges against her was that she wore men’s garments while leading France’s armies. Times how they have changed.

Joan of Arc’s story in itself is remarkable; Twain’s treatment of it is a masterpiece. Were angels and saints really talking to her, I don’t know.  Did God really take the side of the French against the English, I don’t know. Was Joan of Arc, illiterate, untrained in warfare, politics, statecraft the remarkable general and strategist as history would have us believe, I don’t know.  Joan lived from 1412 to 1431.  It was time when fairies, demons, angels, witches, spells and demonic possessions were real. The French armies were motivated because they believed she was God sent.  The English armies feared her as they believed her to be a witch able to wield the powers of darkness. Perhaps she succeeded as a general for the same reason Grant did, she was not over cautious, striking quickly and with determination. Whatever the truth is, it supersedes normal human existence.

I am including a blurb from the Barnes and Noble website about this book. They do a better and more succinct review of this work.  I would categorically recommend this novel to any lover of history.

“Very few people know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. He spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival work and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell. He reached his conclusion about Joan’s unique place in history only after studying in detail accounts written by both sides, the French and the English. Because of Mark Twain’s antipathy to institutional religion, one might expect an anti-Catholic bias toward Joan or at least toward the bishops and theologians who condemned her. Instead one finds a remarkably accurate biography of the life and mission of Joan of Arc told by one of this country’s greatest storytellers. The very fact that Mark Twain wrote this book and wrote it the way he did is a powerful testimony to the attractive power of the Catholic Church’s saints. This is a book that really will inform and inspire.”

Book should be available at your local library as an audio-book, eBook and probably even an old fashion, page turner,

It is also available at Amazon: Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

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