What a weird comment. Her dad was one of the best writers, with one of the best understandings, I’ve ever read. Was she being perverse? Or do people just think a writer “can’t understand” when they question “the simplest things”? (Beware: more “scare quotes” to follow.) Seems like it’s the unthinking who can’t understand, who accept the “simple” face of things and don’t examine their deeper, hidden, complex reality.
Almost everyone in Twain’s day “understood” the “simple” truth that God endorsed slavery and reporting the hiding location of an escaped slave was the moral thing to do; refusing to flush out the slave would send you to hell. At first the adolescent Huck Finn “understood” this “simple” truth… but then he refused to go along with it, accepting hell as his “just” reward, showing he couldn’t “understand” after all. I wonder if Susy ever read (or “understood”) Huck Finn.
Susy wrote this when she was 14. No father, however loved, stands too tall in a teenager’s eyes. She recorded elsewhere in her running biography of her father that he was “absence-minded” and didn’t notice things the way other people did. That observation is somewhat charming in its pure innocence, given that her father noticed everything.
What a weird comment. Her dad was one of the best writers, with one of the best understandings, I’ve ever read. Was she being perverse? Or do people just think a writer “can’t understand” when they question “the simplest things”? (Beware: more “scare quotes” to follow.) Seems like it’s the unthinking who can’t understand, who accept the “simple” face of things and don’t examine their deeper, hidden, complex reality.
Almost everyone in Twain’s day “understood” the “simple” truth that God endorsed slavery and reporting the hiding location of an escaped slave was the moral thing to do; refusing to flush out the slave would send you to hell. At first the adolescent Huck Finn “understood” this “simple” truth… but then he refused to go along with it, accepting hell as his “just” reward, showing he couldn’t “understand” after all. I wonder if Susy ever read (or “understood”) Huck Finn.
Susy wrote this when she was 14. No father, however loved, stands too tall in a teenager’s eyes. She recorded elsewhere in her running biography of her father that he was “absence-minded” and didn’t notice things the way other people did. That observation is somewhat charming in its pure innocence, given that her father noticed everything.