Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), was an American writer and humorist, author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven was a story he worked on over many years, and it appeared in its complete form in 1909. Twain was cautious about publishing it earlier, since he knew many readers would find its treatment of heaven irreverent.

This recording presents an extract, in two chapters, and the story is easy to follow without any background. Twain uses the figure of a plain sea captain as his guide, a man with common sense and no patience for pomposity, which gives the narrative both humour and warmth. Behind the jokes lies a serious point about how small our human notions can be when set beside the scale of creation. It is a lively example of the later Twain, playful, sceptical and endlessly inventive.

The comedy depends on Twain’s ability to describe the astonishing in the voice of a no-nonsense sailor, and the contrast is delightful. Some details reflect the religious ideas of the nineteenth century, but the humour is easy to enjoy.

The two recordings, about 1.5 hours in all, are read by a LibriVox volunteer, and the pair fits easily into a single sitting. Captain Stormfield tells his own tale, and his salty plainness is the secret of the joke: the more outlandish the scenery, the more matter-of-fact the telling. Twain’s target is the comfortable picture of heaven that popular hymns and sermons had made familiar, and the humour is at its best when the captain is simply bewildered by how much there is to see.