Adam: The Untold Story
“This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way.”
So begins Mark Twain’s version of the diary of the first man. I must have downloaded Extracts from Adam’s Diary for free on my Kindle awhile ago, but only this week have I gotten around to reading it. This was published in 1897, late in Twain’s career, and apparently he also wrote some extracts from Eve’s diary. He models Adam and Eve after himself and his wife.
Twain approaches the biblical story from a whole new perspective, expanding on the long process by which Adam becomes accustomed to Eve despite her many annoying characteristics, chief of which is her talkativeness. Besides violating the quiet of Eden, she pre-empts Adam in the task of naming everything, and worries about the animals. The buzzard has indigestion because it eats grass, and the tigers and lions seem despondent because they aren’t eating each other. She’s concerned about the fish, too:
She fell into the pond yesterday, when she was looking at herself in it, which she is always doing. She nearly strangled, and said it was most uncomfortable. This made her sorry for the creatures which live there, which she calls fish…So she got a lot of them out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm, but I have noticed them now and then all day, and I don’t see that they are any happier now than they were before, only quieter. When night comes I shall throw them out-doors. I will not sleep with them again, for I find them clammy and unpleasant to lie among when a person hasn’t anything on.
There’s nothing very theological to be found, and God does not figure as a character in the story. I think I’m glad Twain didn’t attempt to satirize the divine character. He does represent Eve’s friendship with the snake as a relief, because the snake talks, and this gives Adam a rest. Adam is on a personal retreat when she eats the apple, and she brings him a few:
In fact, I was not sorry she came, for there are but meagre pickings here, and she brought some of those apples. I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry. It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed… She came curtained in boughs and bunches of leaves, and when I asked her what she meant by such nonsense, and snatched them away and threw them down, she tittered and blushed. I had never seen a person titter and blush before, and to me it seemed unbecoming and idiotic. She said I would soon know how it was myself. This was correct. Hungry as I was, I laid down the apple half-eaten — certainly the best one I ever saw, considering the lateness of the season — and arrayed myself in the discarded boughs and branches, and then spoke to her with some severity and ordered her to go and get some more and not make such a spectacle of herself.
And so it goes. Not till the end does Adam discover that he loves Eve, but only after the long and entertaining process of his attempting to figure out what species of creature Cain and Abel are.
It’s certainly a different way of seeing the Genesis story, irreverent but not maliciously so. There is no overriding agenda other than humor, and it felt good to read something that made me laugh out loud. In fact, I shared some passages aloud with my family last night at the dinner table.
