Maybe the Twain thing doesn't make as much sense as I thought it might. Twain was a populist. He was cross generic. He had a fascination with the middle west that didn't peter out when the buzz moved to California, while at the same time not detracting from his fascination with the vrai west literal and imaginary. All of this could be equally said for Charles Author as of Twain. But something leaves a sour taste as comparison.

All this while I've argued to you that Charles was the preeminent forgotten modernist. Or the forgotten preeminent modernist. But maybe he had nothing to do with modernism at all? Is Twain modern in the slightest? Does Author only anticipate the problems that come with modernism in his own unique way and account for them in a way that is much more postmodernist but really can only be called some sort of anomaly that can't factor into these larger literary movements? Must he be relegated into the position of anomalous precursor read only by intellectuals to prove vapid self serving points? Clearly it must be any and all of these. And we must stride on having undertaken that tasks already at hand. Lest we degrade into the nonsense on convoluted pseudo-generic arguments.

He must have been out west only a little while, maybe ten years at most, after Twain. Of course ten years in that era could see the overthrow of whole ways of life, not to mention nations which tended to have a considerably shorter life span. While the comparison to Twain is in many ways inevitable, their individual roles in the history of American letters diverge at nearly all points. Charles could never have achieved the esteem of Twain and wouldn't have wanted it. If Charles were to embody the American Dream, any american dream, it would have to have been a shadow dream out beyond even the uncharted regions of the west. He didn't want to be known by anything more than the works he produced. And these were more various than could be appreciated. Between his unsigned newspaper columns, his unpublished novels and the piles of paper scraps marked with often undecipherable script, his life was made up of words.

His life was also that of the stories told about him. These began early enough as well. Perhaps not early enough for an ardent fan and biographer. Perhaps not even early enough to ever see outside of whatever persona he was crafting in all the words. That's to say that we never see an outside to him. There's a paradox embedded there. On the one hand we can't possibly believe that any public persona could possibly be so complete as to be without an exterior. The craft of such a thing about imply total knowledge of himself. But at the same time, in his work, we can see a commit to a sense of self that is without outside. As if, as many layers and makeshift masks you want to lay on it, they are all simply permutations of the same self, always giving evidence of the same self inescapably. And unlike the latter day critics, Charles seems to have seen this as the overwhelming blessing of (human) life. There is at least one way to consider life as oneness. And quite simply it seems to be an accordance of life as that only thing. There was never any fracture there for him. None that mattered at least. Which is also to say, full to the brim with fractures of all kinds. Just not the essential one. Until you die at least.

The fact that it is a novel must simultaneously be the most important thing about it and completely irrelevant. It appears at a major turning point in the history of novels, a moment in which novels are desperately--almost as if a conscious being--attempting to reinvent themselves. Not long after the talk became the death of the novel. If that is to be the case then this era must have been its death throes, at least an early violent spasm in that process. But this might only matter a little.

When we say novel we mean--at this moment--not only that which qualifies for the genre formally, but also that which has a specific intouchness with the contemporary world. Modernism is simply another way of saying the same. And the fact that they all become banal is simple that time will outstrip almost every word. That every word applied to timeliness is forced to break with the nature of itself as a word, to fissure internally saying at once 'the now' and the saying of it that must already be past by the time it hits your ears. And so the sundered words pile up behind us, novel, modern, contemporary, futurist. Even Avant-Guard can be difficult to say without an ironic lilt.

And this is part of the forgetting that matters. When I say novel to you know, I mean whatever force that word is capable of or was. I am attempting to communicate it in its force, not its banality. The word has begun to store doubts inside of it even before it shatters. At the point that Charles was writing the word was certainly not yet broken. He had enough faith in it to think it could house his meanings without too damaging a distortion.

To be more precise--and Charles is fairly clear in at least this own respect--distortion is planned into the work as unavoidable. He didn't privilege the form even while relying on it. Unlike his contemporaries he might have been just as willing to come out in the trades, or to print whatever one would want to call his work serially in the San Francisco local he used to work for.

As someone who speaks about the novel and would like to continue to these sorts of stipulation have to be put into order. Genre description must be mobile. Some of the most important things ever to be said about novels were said nearly two thousand years before their advent and likely about the structure of columns on a little Greek ile's premier temple. And out loud. That is to say that what we're really talking about here is much more broad than any one genre. It is much more likely to be an issue of art and how it communicates or can. You can't read, at least I couldn't, Charles and not feel like its life that's at the heart of it. Maybe I mean, you can't read it without feeling like you're living?

Some days spent reading, you lift your head up into the twilight of an already ill lit room and feel as you've just absented yourself from a day of your life. That you cashed it in and disappeared somewhere else. This can be a great sensation if you're in need of escape. Or it can leave you hollow and husked like the shell you is ill fit in this world and shouldn't go get up and feed itself for the sustenance of your body. Either because the other world is better or this one is just damned awful. Charles, however, never elicits this feeling. Living is what I called it. Which means that if you lift your head out of a book and see that the light has waned and you've yet to light a lamp or feed yourself or bathe that this is a glorious sensation. You've been to busy plunging into the world of the human soul, not a vicarious passenger on a picaresque journey through wartime europe but a robust assistante, meticulously attending to the patchwork reconnaissance of life itself in the human and in the world. As coming off of a day of hard physical labour that is satisfying in the union it creates between mind and body both conjoined in the need for rest and sensation of deserving pure and simple. While the reading body is a repose, in these moments, it is not denigrated, but exalted and allowed to rest as in celebration of its continual work. A god at a feast thrown its honor. Invisible for a time but everywhere invoked.

He exists in his writing the same way that other people of that era exist in the hazy daguerreotype that seems to be marked that a whole history, not only in the faces held still too long to hide much of the visage's life history and true sentiments, but also in the process itself, a conglomeration of precious metals, deadly chemicals poorly understood and the ingenuity of a rogue inventor's population. There isn't a picture of him to be had, nor a true word one might easily assume. Throwing his own writing straight out the window as any kind of true account, we're left with only that which was written of him in his already infamy. And the recollections of those who knew him before infamy. Usually tinged with more than the standard level of coattail riding criticism. Something more like a mass confusion about anything like his true character--if we haven't be thoroughly disabused of that concept in his own writing--permanently mired in the æther that surrounded his own self-presentation, so important especially to his early "journalistic" work.

The historical record has always been a shabby construction. Some people's meticulously precise movements throughout their lives have been tracked throughout all time. One might even contend that precise historical account of certain individuals predate history itself or are the cause of it, the rough stone idol work that would later become history proper. And other people, meanwhile are left completely out of the history making, all recording process even up to our present day with the ever accelerating means of seeing, recording, retaining and attempting to put to use of every scrap of life. And the nature of time and chance says that you'll never know who in advance you should have been keeping tabs on because you'll never know who was worth knowing about. So you end up with the boring lives of kings, the mundanity of the wealthy. Meanwhile Homer is nothing more than a mythical sketch who may or may not have existed. Shakespeare is more or less a ghost possibly undergoing a process of doubt that could leave him as potentially nonexistent as Homer within a few short hundreds of years. There is always the possibility however, that these yarn spinners wanted it that way and found creative ways to duck the all seeing eyes, stay out of the public records, at least in any way they couldn't get their hand on. That's got to be the case now with Charles. A bit of chanced luck and a couple right moves and most of what we have left first hand is a signed paystub helpfully punctuated: Charles, Author.