I Don't Intend to, Either.

Should it embarrass me to confess that sometimes I think of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens as the same person? I am, in fact, clear on who each one is, distinct in his own fancifully-dark, hyperbolically-insightful, nationally-steeped way. Twain is so American and Dickens is so English. And yet there is something Twainish about Dickens, and something somewhat Dickensian about Twain, don't you think?

What's doing an even finer job of conflating the two is the fact that today is Twain's birthday. (A date I've long been aware of because it is also my mother's birthday, and at some point in my childhood, that little piece of trivia popped up and lodged in my memory. Happy birthday, Mom!) And this upcoming year, annum 2012, is the much-celebrated 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth. The Writer's Almanac, today's Google doodle, and plenty of culture blogs are chiming in today with a multitude of Clemens bio curiosities**, while just yesterday, The New York Times's Book Bench was telling me about various bicentenary Dickens celebrations. As if that weren't enough, here, on Twain Day 2011, sits a brand new biography, crisp and fresh off some November's printing press run: Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin. It was delivered to me yesterday by the obliging folks at Amazon.com.

It is all too much to keep an already-confused head straight. And I'll tell you what's more. Not two hours ago, the public librarian handed me not just one but two books across the hold desk, and they are newly-published doozies: Mary Doria Russell's historical fiction piece, Doc (Doc Holliday, that is) and Neal Stephenson's speculative thriller Reamde. Not a page under 400. (Okay, fine, Doc actually pulls in at 394. Artistic license.) What this spells for me is three big books. What it spells is December's reading list, set in bold black type. What it spells is please, no one loan or recommend or give me any more books for the duration of the month. My nose will not remove itself from these pages till the last tome's cover is closed. And which one will be opened first? The Dickens, of course. (Not Twain. Dickens.)

Several years ago, I began reading Dickens in earnest, set in motion by Bleak House, c. Winter 2009. Most of you probably know all about that by now and wish I'd stop talking about how appropriate Dickens is to Winter Reading. But what I may not (yet) have gone on about ad nauseam is how I started reading biographies to begin with. Interestingly, it started with Claire Tomalin, the very biographer of this new Dickens book. In January of 2010, now almost two years ago, some question popped up about Jane Austen, and I got me to a library (the hard-copy kind - not Google! Thank you very much) to find out the answer. I chose one of the several Austen biographies that were on the shelf, fully expecting to read an early chapter or two, skim the rest of the first half, renew several times with good intentions, and then return. It was Tomalin's book I chose. Shockingly, I finished it in its entirety. I even read it before bedtime! Who was I, Rebecca Martin, lover of fiction only fiction alwaysfictionallthetime, becoming? A reader of biographies, apparently.

More recently, this past summer, I picked up an edited collection of Virginia Woolf's letters and found I was not alone: " . . . I've had the habit of getting full of some biography and wanting to build up my imaginary figure of the person with every scrap of news I could find about him," she said. Further, "During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byron or whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikely pages." Exactly! Writer's Almanac, the latest Guardian book review, the news, for goodness sake. I get sucked in. Literary voyeurism. Today, it's Samuel Clemens. This month, Charles Dickens – and this time not just a seasonal novel read, but a full-on 527-page biography. I'm going to know all about him. And, with all my love to the libraries and used bookstores around the globe, it'll be in new-book form. My own book! The smell of the press barely cooled off the page. (My goodness, it smells so good. It smells like . . . what was that store's name? . . . Right. Borders. I loved that store. I'm not ashamed.)

Yes, confessed antiquarian though I am, sometimes it is downright nice to own a new book. Having been born five days before – and 141 years after – Mark Twain, it was at this time last year that I received a birthday package in the mail. The package was from a distant friend, and the contents included a book – a new book! Lucy Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Oh, the forgotten delight of a smooth new hardback, all slick-covered and crisp-paged, straight from the shelves of Barnes & Noble or the bankrupted like. I sat down savoringly, days in a row, steeped in the nonfiction world of Lucy Duff Gordon. Who? I didn't know either before cracking the covers. It's not really relevant, except that there I was, nine months pregnant and not to be interrupted for breakfast, dinner, bathroom break, or anything . . . for a biography. A shiny new one. And I don't even like Egypt. Interestingly, Charles Dickens was a visitor in Lucy Duff Gordon's literary Victorian home. And so we come almost full circle.

Dickens and Twain. Twain on Dickens. A little Google searching (though the library could probably tell me more) informs me they probably never met, though they were alive at the same time (Twain the significantly younger of the two), and Twain himself wrote a report of the Dickens reading he attended in 1868. His write-up of Dickens the Public Figure was more complimentary than his description of Dickens the Public Reader, though neither are glowing reviews. That's Twain for you: never dull, never unhumorous, and never anything but straightforward. But he still leaves you with the impression he might have liked Dickens the Man. Or perhaps that's just my imagination running away with me.

The real question my conflating brain poses is this: What if Twain had written Dickens? Or, conversely, what if Dickens had written Twain? Now that's something to get your imaginations chugging. Those writers twain (get it??) run fathoms deep, and more than two fathoms, at that. But as Twain did not write Dickens, I'll sound the depths with Tomalin for the time being.

The above-mentioned Book Bench article makes the wry observation that "a century and three quarters after his first visit here, we Americans still won’t leave Charles Dickens alone." Twain didn't, and, in my best imitation of Virginia-Woof-as-literary-stalker, I don't intend to, either. I've got my cup of coffee. The baby's asleep. Here next to the desk lie my three brand new December tomes, Dickens on top. It's time to crackle open that satisfyingly new and stiff cover and dive in for awhile.

**A possible favorite of which is the genesis of Samuel Clemens's pen name, “Mark Twain,” meaning two fathoms deep in riverboat talk. And really, "twain" is just a downright satisfying word to say out loud. Try it. In a stentorian voice: "Mark twain!" as though you were on back of a ship. No one will ever know.