Mark Twain, eccentric

Mark Twain, by Frederick Waddy, 1872

© The Granger Collection/Alamy

Mark Twain, eccentric

Daniel Karlin considers the difficulties in dealing with an American classic

Daniel Karlin

TLS, October 17, 2018

Mark Twain continues to bedevil the academy, if not the reading public. Like Kipling, he has been by turns reviled and revered, often for the wrong reasons; like Kipling he has been saddled with “representing” his nation, or race, or “period”, and ridden up and down this sterile track until it seems kinder to shoot him, or at least be shot of him. But like Kipling again, Twain won’t lie down. He has limitations that would sink most writers: not only is he ignorant about so much (and full of his ignorance), credulously sceptical, odiously prejudiced, but he seems incapable of distinguishing between what in him was incomparable and immortal, and what was shallow, conventional and offensive. The best of Twain can’t be matched; the worst stinks; and they are served on the same plate.

Of the books under review, one, Mark Twain and Youth, is a hapless collection of short pieces, divided into sections on family, life and work. Some of these items are recycled from earlier publications, and most hover uneasily between the “Companion” entry and the academic essay. The contributors repeatedly duplicate material and quotations, and the editors, Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen, seemingly exercised no control over level or tone. Perhaps they were unable to veto Hal Holbrook’s cringeworthy “celeb” foreword, which begins with the one-line paragraph “He was a boy raised on a river” and flows majestically downhill from there, but they might have challenged Victor Fischer and Benjamin Griffin, in their “Dialogue on Mark Twain’s Autobiography”, to come up with something less clunky (“You’re suggesting, I think, that the real catalyst is the maternal authority.” – “I am.”), or at least have persuaded them to drop the winsome ending (“Here the authors ceased to eavesdrop, because the conversation’s pants were getting very fancy and it promised to falute on a correspondingly high level”). We are frequently told things we knew already, or that are self-evident, or pointless. “‘Gender-bending,’ a term for gender-role reversals and twisting, is an ｅxpression Mark Twain himself would never have used” begins one essay, leaving it ambiguous as to whether this was by choice or historical necessity; another springs it on us that “According to Dr. Selina Schryver, orphans behave differently from other children”. A discussion of the source for the char­acter of Huckleberry Finn, a boy called Tom Blankensip, concludes sagely that it doesn’t really matter:

“Following Hannibal’s 1850 census, there is little trace of the Blankensips. Perhaps fittingly, the family simply fades into obscurity while Huckleberry Finn continues to receive accolades as one of literature’s pre­eminent figures”. How Twain would have loved the pomposity of that! The contributors, many of them (as the accolade goes) “distinguished’” Twain scholars, don’t distinguish themselves here.

    

It is a relief to turn to an old-fashioned “contribution to knowledge”, made by the solid, scholarly edition of Twain’s correspondence with his lifelong friend, travelling companion and religious sparring partner, Joseph Hopkins Twichell. The letters, meticulously edited and annotated, are unremark­able in themselves – Twichell’s do little more than demonstrate the strength of his attachment to Twain (whose homoerotic side one of the editors, Peter Messent, has studied in Mark Twain and Male Friendship, 2009) and his willingness to tolerate what he might not have coun­tenanced in any other member of his Hartford congregation. Twain’s letters are no great shakes, either. His style is more assimilable to standard epistolary conventions, less adventurous, less imaginative even than his workaday journalism, and most of the exceptions are variants of published articles or sketches. There’s a riotous description of groping in pitch darkness for an odd sock on his bedroom floor – but this letter postdates Twain’s appropriation of it for A Tramp Abroad (1880). The liveliest anecdotes, such as the one about a “miracle” in the Roman Campagna in which the Virgin Mary gets the credit for the coupling of two wild dogs, belong more to Twain’s “routine”, his “shtick”, than to anything personal to himself or his correspondent.

Towards the end, as Twain’s life darkened with the deaths of his daughters Susy and Jean, and then of his wife Livy, he became if anything stiffer in his epistolary manner, though he was still capable of a quick retort to religious humbug, pouncing, in a letter of 1905, on Twichell’s pious formula about the “steady progress from age to age of the oncoming of the kingdom of God & righteousness”: “‘From age to age’ – yes, it describes that giddy gait”. Had Twain not been so famous, the “completist” urge to gather, edit and interpret everything he wrote might not have given rise to this volume. But under the direction of Harold K. Bush, Steve Courtney and Peter Messent, handsomely served by the University of Georgia Press, it has been admirably done. The introduction, linking commentary and notes, taken together may give an impression of over-fullness, or over-investment in the significance of trivial details, but this is a positive virtue compared to the scantiness and neglect of so many “authoritative” editions.

When a writer has been so ploughed over, the effort to find a new angle often results in a loss of perspective. Both Douglas Anderson’s The Introspective Art of Mark Twain and Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn’s Mark Twain and France make large claims for their revisionist approaches which can’t be backed up and would have been more persuasive had they been more modestly proposed. Anderson, in particular, asks us to believe a very unlikely thesis – that introspection, an interest in the workings of the mind as such, is at the heart of Twain’s craft as a writer – instead of contenting himself with pointing out, as he does in a series of acute, sensitive and (in the best sense) appreciative close readings, how good Twain was at representing the play of consciousness – when he chose. But this would not have been “new”. The drift of Huck’s thoughts aligned with the drift of the river, the slippages of personal memory and historical time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the cunning not quite randomness of the dictated passages in the Autobiography (on which Anderson is especially good) – these are known quantities in Twain criticism. Anderson has done a great service in bringing so many of them together, and he is a skilled, tenacious critic, but his theory is a Procrustean bed, and there are painful moments of lopping and stretching. For example, take this passage from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”:

If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to – to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road.

What comment does Anderson make on this vignette? To quote Twain on another occasion, “It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe”. It is this: “In the generous imaginative climate of Twain’s story, even a straddle-bug can have an inner life that sometimes calls for extraordinary outward exertions”. This can’t be made to work, and even when he is on stronger ground Anderson’s pitch suffers from over-emphasis. In the chapter called “Attention” he has an extended, absorbing discussion of the objects Tom Sawyer gathers from the boys he successively dupes into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – “twelve marbles, part of a jewsharp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon”, and so on, down to “the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old window sash”. Twain, like Whitman, was a master of the catalogue, that first great trope of American rhetoric, and I am happy to accept that all these objects have what Anderson calls “symbolic resonance”. But that’s not enough for him: he tries to coerce them into signifying in his dir­ection, so that they reflect back on the psychological trick Tom plays in order to acquire them, and on the processes of consciousness (memory, fantasy, repressed desire) that each might suggest. I’m not convinced by this reflexive turn; it feels forced, and is an instance of the book undoing its own good work.

The subtitle of Mark Twain and France, The making of a new American identity, states the book’s ambition and overstates its case. The authors know perfectly well the challenge they have taken on. “When most readers think of Mark Twain, France does not come immediately to mind”, the book begins. The time he actually spent in France was limited, and his views of French history, French society, the French language, French literature and the French national character, were on a dead level of nineteenth-century Anglo-American Protestant opinion – including his hero worship of Joan of Arc. (He thought his last novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1895, his best; it’s as dull as unseasoned porridge.) He never made a single original observation about a French person, place, or book, though he conveyed his off-the-peg impressions with panache. And he played the unassimilable foreigner card both ways, as when, at the end of The Innocents Abroad, he mocks his own and his fellow “pilgrims” for their ignorance and insularity: “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language”. Even here the joke, though consummately delivered, is an old one, and most of Twain’s French flourishes, like the guying of the King and the Duke as ancien régime aristocrats in Huckleberry Finn, have this air of brilliant refurbishment. (Perhaps an exception might be made for his witty “Map of Paris” during the Franco–Prussian War, the subject of a lively and informative discussion in this book.)

All this Harrington and Jenn might concede, but they seek to turn these disadvantages inside out, so to speak – to present the very flatness and mediocrity of Twain’s visible engagement with France into a deceptive surface, below which a much deeper and more significant process of identity-formation was enabled to take place. “The French serve as a kind of foil that he uses, by contradistinction, to help build a modern American sense of cultural self”: that’s the central claim, and even if it is hedged with qualifications (“a kind of foil”, to “help build”) the special relationship is insistently propounded. As with Anderson’s theme of “introspection”, the totalizing drive of the theory sweeps common sense before it: the absence of French from Twain’s schooling, for example, “surely conveyed an unspoken message about the relative unimportance of French culture”, and by “put[ting] the French in their place” gave Twain a model for “elevating instead the origins of an emerging Anglo-American identity”. In one of his earliest pieces of journalism, the occurrence of “French” names such as “Chouteau” and “Berthoud” in the report of a new banking venture in St Louis is seen as “perhaps betraying a touch of cultural anxiety that the French might outshine the Anglos”. The book is damaged by these small, repeated infusions of unlikelihood. And this is a pity because, like Anderson, Harrington and Jenn do have interesting things to say, especially in their emphasis on the buried history of the French colonial presence in the American South. The Mississippi, they remind us, was first explored by a Frenchman, La Salle, to whom Twain paid tribute when he visited St Louis in 1902 and stepped aboard a steamboat for the last time. The steamboat was being rechristened the Mark Twain, and the ceremony was performed by a French countess; the whole jamboree, as Harrington and Jenn point out, was part of the run-up to the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 1903, and the St Louis World’s Fair a year later. These events are skilfully related and contextualized, but when Harrington and Jenn affirm that Twain “had reclaimed Missouri in fiction as surely as the Louisiana Purchase had claimed it in fact”, the illogic of their position is painfully exposed. “Reclaimed” from whom? Not from the French, for there was no tradition of French fiction about Missouri; nor did the Louisiana Purchase, as the name implies, constitute a “claim” to possession. Twain’s fiction is not in competition with “Creole” writing in the South, exemplified by George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes, published in 1880 but set in New Orleans in the early years of the century and in its way as important a novel about the antebellum South as Huckleberry Finn.

These books are a tiny sample of Twain criticism – more have piled up over the past year. How Joe B. Fulton stood it is a mystery. In Mark Twain Under Fire he surveys Twain’s “reception and reputation” over a century and a half, and he admits that he can’t cover everything. He tries to make it sound fun: “A major plagiarist is unveiled in these pages, a member of the Nazi party outed, and numerous conspiracies exposed; as the duke says, ‘If that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!’” (He is alluding to the episode in Huckleberry Finn in which the two con men, the “King” and the “Duke”, advertise a show in a small town with the line “LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED”.) Leaving aside the irony in taking this particular joke from Huckleberry Finn, given what happens to the King and the Duke after the third performance of their obscene show, I just want to say, on behalf of all Arkansawyers, that nothing Fulton could have done would “fetch” us in the way he expects. For all his vigour, colloquial style and sardonic humour, he can’t help sounding like one of those well-meaning and knowledgeable tour guides – a riverboat one, let us say – pointing out objects of historical interest on the banks that vanish almost as soon as mentioned.

Book after book, critic after critic, step forward and speak their piece; some are praised, others rebuked (Fulton wants to do more than merely “survey” the field; he has strong views, and the space he gives to particular strands of “criticism and controversy” reflects his polemical approach); but a mere handful actually matter, or are still around, still broadcasting outside the closed circuit of academic debate. “Rowe was a target for Kalter”, Fulton remarks at one point, “as the newer ‘new Americanists’ began critiquing the older new Americanists”. That was in 2011; perhaps Kalter herself has been “critiqued” by now (a euphemism Orwell would have relished). This is from the final chapter, “Mark Twain as a Partisan in the Culture Wars, 1990s to 2015”, in which Fulton finds himself successively embracing, or recoiling from, prolif­erating “approaches” to Twain which ask us to read him through “hypercanonicity”, or blackface minstrelsy, or Freudian grief-theory, or American imperialism (or Exceptionalism, or Calvinism, or Modernism, or indeed anything which can be preceded by “American”). It is hard to discern any rationale other than “It is difference of opinion that makes horse races” – another of Twain’s aphorisms that Fulton cites without quite seeing its import. The chapter opens with a salvo against a meretricious piece in Harper’s Magazine from 1996 which claimed that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a better book than Huckleberry Finn – not worth mentioning even as a taster – and shifts on the next page to an all-out assault on Sacvan Bercovitch’s Tate Modern-style rehang of the Cambridge History of American Literature, whose third volume, Prose Writing from 1860 to 1920, published in 2005, contained no chapter on Twain (on the basis that “American literary history is no longer the history of a certain, agreed-upon group of American masterworks”). Bercovitch is a target worth taking aim at, because CHAL is going to be around for a lot longer than an article in Harper’s. But Fulton doesn’t seem to think the difference between these targets matters, perhaps because he is using the term “culture wars” in too loose a way for it to hold his story together. It isn’t clear where the battle lines are drawn, and some of the combatants seem more interested in attacking each other than a common enemy: the Native American poet and critic Nompewahthe / Carter Revard, for example, wants not just to expose Twain’s “hatred” of Native Americans, but his fellow liberal critics’ silence about that hatred. The second part of his article’s title, “Why Mark Twain Murdered Injun Joe – and Will Never Be Indicted” (2000), is as important as the first: “The critics are alert to Twain’s management of the hot issues of race and gender, but the issues are seen to touch only Blacks, Jews, and Women” (I hope that someone, somewhere, has already objected to the flattening effect of this stereotyped grouping). The question readers of Twain might want answered – whether any of this matters, whether it has made any difference to anything other than the stock-price (to use one of Twain’s favourite metaphors) of the critics concerned – gets lost in Fulton’s narrative.

Yet Fulton has one story to tell which does matter, and which energizes, in particular, the opening chapters of the book. He is deeply interested – and implicated, through his own record as a Twain scholar – in the way that “Twain’s acceptance as a writer worthy of attention was closely related to the acceptance of American literature as a legitimate subject of study”. But Fulton also understands that “American literature” was not itself a stable category. Indeed, its own “legitimacy” had been contested since Independence (and the roots of this contest, as Stephen Fender among many other literary historians has shown, go back to the very beginnings of European discovery and settlement). What constituted “authentic” American writing? Was it to do with the assimilation and development of European models, or a violent swerve away from them? – violence, as D. H. Lawrence long ago pointed out in Studies in Classic American Literature, being the modus operandi of American “newness”. In classifying Twain as a “Western humorist”, early critics placed as much emphasis on the first term as the second: the “West” encoded a vision of Americanness which reached into every sphere of political and cultural discourse. Fulton gives an excellent account of the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century American scholars (most of them educated in the East) who wanted both to establish American literature on strong “native” ground yet struggled to recognize that ground in Calaveras County, or a Colorado silver mine, or on the banks of the Mississippi. The core of the book’s value for contemporary readers is less in its reporting of the disputes over Twain’s position with regard to this or that contemporary issue – Fulton himself is impatient with “politicking in literary criticism” by critics “us[ing] Twain to vent about contemporary American history or foreign policy” – than in its tracing of the contours of an older and more enduring argument. The stability of an achieved “centre” in American culture is constantly threatened from the frontier, or the margins, whether these terms are defined by geography or by any combination of human factors – race, class, gender, religion.

The radical redefinition of American place was accompanied by that of voice. Twain’s mastery of American speech is epitomized by the “Explanatory” preamble to Huckleberry Finn which informs the reader that the book is written in three dialects, the last of which (“the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect”) is itself subject to “four modified varieties”, and that this differentiation had been made “pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech”. The slight but perceptible shock of this statement lies in the substitution of “personal familiarity” for the conventional phrase we might have expected, “persons familiar”. Twain is doing more than claiming that the language of the book is authentic, he is claiming that this authenticity is self-begot. If this is a historical novel (as, in 1885, it was) it is based on Twain’s own history. No one else is acknowledged as able to offer “trustworthy guidance and support”. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Twain, like Whitman, took Emerson at his word, and each may be credited with making American speech a central fact of American writing. The leap Twain took may be measured by comparing his statement with that of another author about the speech of a fictional character from Mississippi, who appeared in a novel serialized alongside excerpts from Huckleberry Finn in the Century Magazine in 1885. When Henry James informs his readers that Basil Ransom, the (dubious) hero of The Bostonians, is from Mississippi, he notes that he “spoke very perceptibly with the accent of that country”, but then adds this disclaimer:

It is not in my power to reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect; but the initiated reader will have no difficulty in evoking the sound, which is to be associated in the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain . . . the reader who likes a complete image, who desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is entreated not to forget that he prolonged his consonants and swallowed his vowels, that he was guilty of elisions and interpolations which were equally unexpected, and that his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field.

James’s disclaimer is characteristically layered and suggestive, but his appeal to the “initiated reader” is also consciously evasive; his calling Mississippi a “country” is a small sign (one of many in the book) that the reintegration of the Confederate states into the Union was not complete, that the South was still “foreign” – a nuance which the “something almost African” in Basil’s “rich, basking tone” does nothing to dispel.

Twain’s method is both more straight­forward and, in this respect at least, more comprehensive than James’s. He had no scruples about finding the right “combination of characters” to reproduce a regional accent or rural dialect, but more important, he saw past James’s horror of the “vulgar or vain” – almost the only flaw in the great dragon’s armour. For Twain, by contrast, American vulgarity was elemental, all-encompassing, fertile – the deep over which his spirit brooded. In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, the narrator is asked by a friend “from the East” to make enquiries about “Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley” (the italics are in the original), only to be treated by “good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler” to a series of anecdotes about “Jim Smiley” (ditto), a compulsive gambler, horse-racer, dog-fighter, cock-fighter – the hero (and butt) of a classic trickster tale. Already, in Twain’s imaginative economy, the markers of “Eastern” culture and status inscribed in “Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley” have been effaced and a different “script” has been inscribed over them. But more is at stake than making fun of Eastern pretension. one of Jim Smiley’s (paying) pastimes is matching his unprepossessing bull-pup against other, seemingly stronger dogs, which Smiley’s dog invariably beats. The dog’s name is Andrew Jackson, that most nativist of Presidents – and the celebrated jumping frog’s name is Dan’l Webster. Webster was Jackson’s enemy in the Senate, but he was in his own way as ardent a nationalist, and five years after Jackson’s death he supported the Compromise of 1850, whose ignoble concessions to the slave­holding states of the South managed to stave off the Civil War for a decade.

These are not fortuitous names. They announce Twain’s allegiance to a particular kind of Americanness, but they don’t do so in a simplistic way. After all, both dog and frog end up defeated. The frog’s fate is well known (loaded with buckshot by a stranger who finally outwits Jim Smiley, as even Brer Rabbit is eventually “kotched up wid” by Brer Terrapin). But what happens to the dog is in some ways more significant. Andrew Jackson’s fighting strategy is to allow himself to be tackled and bully-ragged and bitten and thrown over until the moment comes when he seizes the other dog’s hind leg and won’t let go, to the point where his opponent is exhausted – a strategy later adopted by Rocky Balboa. His come-uppance is absurd: he is put up against a dog “that didn’t have no hind legs, because they’d been sawed off by a circular saw”. Twain – in the deadpan tone of old Simon Wheeler, who tells his “queer yarn” about Jim Smiley “without ever smiling” – makes this preposterous premiss the occasion of a brilliant tragicomedy: when the dog “come to make a snatch for his pet holt”,

he saw in a minute how he’d been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he ’peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn’t try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn’t no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died.

The effect – ruthless, funny, poignant – comes from the mastery not just of idiom, but of syntax – the interpolation of a redundant relative clause (“which was his main dependence in a fight” – we already knew that!) into a paratactic sequence. What a story of baffled American prowess! It is something to keep a straight face while telling a tall tale, but throughout his career Twain gave this standard mode of fooling the innocent, the greenhorn, the mug, a sharp literary twist. The frame-narrator, remember, declares himself bored silly by the story that entranced America when it first appeared.

There is more. If the West is a “younger” country than the East, it is also older; the term I used earlier, “trickster tale”, allies “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to story types that have roots in the Native American story cycles of Coyote, in the African origin tales of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, and in remoter forms such as Aesop’s Fables or the Hindu Panchantantra. This had been known back East, too, by American writers of the early Republic such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, those desperately respectable chroniclers of the wilderness. Jim Smiley is a cousin of Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, the American hero of a borrowed European folk tale, set in the Catskill Mountains when the East was, so to speak, the West – the locus of change, “progress” and rebellion, but also of the things those tremendous abstract historical processes leave behind. In Huckleberry Finn – still, for all that can be said on behalf of other great works, from The Innocents Abroad to Puddn’head Wilson, Twain’s masterpiece – this figure reaches its apogee, embodying an innocence, or authenticity, Twain knew America had never had.