Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3

  If these questions seem abstract or even comic in the context of words as sounds, what Hank sees with his own eyes at the novel’s conclusion drives the issue of technology home with graphic seriousness. Any retelling of the myth of Camelot has to end unhappily, to be sure, and one of the conditions that anyone telling a tale about traveling back in history has to accept is that, since the past cannot change, any record of the visit must be erased; but the shape Twain’s imagination gave the catastrophic climax of Connecticut Yankee is astounding. When the tension between Hank’s reforms and the status quo erupts into war, Hank and his team of trained boys set up another kind of machine in another cave: a huge dynamo, capable of generating enough power to electrocute thousands of people at one time. Hank’s technology, which includes land mines and Gatling guns, allows him to annihilate an army of knights. But after the battle, as he and his technicians find themselves trapped by the bodies of the 25,000 men they have killed, they discover their technology has conquered them too—and made those figures of speech about hell on earth all too literal. Hank’s boys die, in fact, of air pollution, from the environmental impact of the rotting corpses their killing machines have produced. Readers in 1889 could not know how prescient this ending was, how closely the landscape created by Hank’s weaponry resembles the waste land that modern warfare would make of much of Europe in the twentieth century. But it’s hard to believe those readers were not troubled by the way the story that began with a comic dream ends with a military-industrial nightmare. If so, however, they left no record of any such uneasiness. One of the most striking things about the novel’s contemporary reviews is that none so much as mentioned the apocalyptic violence of its climax.

  Nor did any contemporary reviewer mention the equally surprising note the novel strikes on its very last page, when Hank dies nostalgic for the sixth century. Although Merlin’s ineffective spells provide comic relief throughout the rest of the novel, at the close he casts one on Hank that puts him to sleep for thirteen centuries. But Merlin getting his magic to work is not the biggest surprise. Although Hank has striven earnestly throughout his time in Camelot to transform medieval England into modern America, when he does wake up to find himself back in the late nineteenth century, he feels even stranger in the modern world, desperately missing the past he worked so hard to reconstruct. This may be another irony we are in a better position to appreciate than were Twain and his contemporaries. The generation that lived between the Civil War and World War I went through perhaps the most drastic transformation in the nature of common life that any group of Americans has ever witnessed. Terms like “industrialization,” “urbanization,” and “immigration” can give us labels for the changes they experienced. Statistics like the fact that when Sam Clemens was born in 1835 most Americans lived on farms, whereas when Mark Twain published Connecticut Yankee one in three Americans lived in cities can give us ways to measure the changes. But Twain’s story can, in its surreal way, help us get inside the psychic life of the times. Twain’s first imaginative return to the past took place when he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and carried readers back to a representation of his own childhood in the little village beside the big river. The world to which he transports Hank Morgan has much in common with the antebellum one in which Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper play Robin Hood: Both St. Petersburg and Camelot are slave-owning, agrarian, pastoral, and provincial—that is, culturally homogeneous. Building factories on that land, running railroads and telephone lines across it, introducing all kinds of new ideas into it—what Hank does in a few years to the sixth century resembles what had happened at only a slightly slower pace in nineteenth century America. Boastful as Hank and his times were about all the progress they were making, it is understandable if there were moments when they wondered if all change was “progress.”

  The title of Hank’s manuscript is “The Tale of the Lost Land.” We know America loved the nostalgic account of its national childhood that Tom Sawyer offers. Perhaps the ambiguities of Hank’s story, including the silence of its first audience about the grim way it ends, reflect the anxieties of the fin de siècle about the modernity toward which Twain and his generation felt themselves rushing. We are all always traveling through time, of course, but only in one direction. As Twain’s contemporaries would have known as they watched the world’s first skyscrapers rise in Chicago as if right out of the prairie, the past is always disappearing behind us. “Progress” is one of America’s enabling faiths. By contrasting the present that Hank represents with the past of legend and romance, Twain set out to validate that faith. In the novel he wound up writing, however, there are plenty of reasons to doubt it. Hank sees it as an improvement when, for instance, he turns the Round Table into a stock exchange. But when we learn that the Siege Perilous, the seat at the table originally set aside for the knight who was absolutely pure of heart, can now be bought for money and has been acquired by the adulterous Launcelot, we may question whether individual opportunity and cutthroat capitalism are unequivocally a better basis on which to found a society than oaths of allegiance and feudal deference. In Twain’s retelling, it is, in fact, Launcelot’s stock-market manipulations as well as his affair with Guenever that destroy Camelot.

  Travel books invariably reveal at least as much about the travelers, and the assumptions of the cultures they come from, as they do about the places they visit. Although none of Twain’s contemporaries acknowledged it, Connecticut Yankee is less a window onto the Arthurian past than a funhouse mirror held up to the American nineteenth century. This becomes especially true when Hank (to quote the way Twain phrased it in a note to a promotional pre-publication excerpt from the novel that appeared in the Century magazine) “privately set[s] himself the task of introducing the great and beneficent civilization of the nineteenth century” into Arthur’s realm. Looking in that mirror, we can see Hank’s campaign to impose what Twain calls “a ‘Republic on the American plan’” on the people of the sixth century either as a version of what the northern carpetbaggers did (two decades before Twain’s novel) when they went into the South to reconstruct that society after the Civil War, or what American imperialists did beginning with the Spanish-American War (a decade after Twain’s novel) when the United States decided to project its power onto other peoples. Hank’s identification of himself as “a Yankee of the Yankees” (p. 19) points in both directions, because Yankee means “northerner” when pronounced with a southern accent and “North American” when pronounced, say, with a Spanish accent. We’ve already noted the connections Twain made between the old South he was raised in and “the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization,” which suggests how much there would be to say if we rotated the novel ninety degrees, from the east-west axis of Old World and New (along which the country’s larger history and Hank’s time traveling move) to the north-south axis of Union and Confederate along which both the nation’s central nineteenth-century conflicts and Clemens’s own life as a person born into a slave-owning, agrarian South and then transplanted to an abolitionist, industrial New England were aligned. But another part of the novel’s richness as a guide to American culture is what it seems to say, prophetically, about the nation’s imminent rise to world power. In 1900, after witnessing the nation’s behavior in the Philippines, Twain declared “I am an anti-imperialist.” Some of his strongest late works are his attacks on imperialism, including “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905). Read in this context, Connecticut Yankee’s account of exporting America to foreign lands is prescient, and devastating.

  The book’s anti-imperialism is another theme that comes into focus only when we read it ironically. Hank describes himself as a liberator, even—as when he talks about his intention to “resurrect a dead nation” (p. 88)—a savior. Occasionally he will acknowledge that he has an agenda of his own, as when he predicts that his 1,300-year edge on the Arthurians will enable him to “boss the whole country inside of three months” (p. 30) or a
dmits his “base hankering to be [the] first president” (p. 418) of the republic he hopes to establish. But he never wavers in his missionary faith that by Americanizing the sixth century, he is redeeming it. When he looks at the lives of the people who actually live in this “dead nation,” he is most struck by what they don’t have, what is not there—“no soap, no matches, no looking-glass” (p. 67), “no books, pens, paper, or ink,” no “sugar, coffee, tea or tobacco” (p. 69). He does feel an obligation to learn more about who and what is there: Behind the trip he takes with Arthur in the second half lies the desire “to inform [himself] perfectly of [the common people’s] every-day life” (p. 245), to find out something at least about the culture he is planning to obliterate and replace not just with the American values of democracy and freedom, but also with an American system of currency and newspapers and advertising and so on. Yet his contempt for the un-American ways in which those people think and act is at least as palpable as his desire to make their lives better. At various points, for instance, he refers to them as “savages,” as a “herd of human sheep,” “these innumerable clams,” even “human muck.”

  In the early chapters Hank compares his strange awakening in a new world to those of Columbus, Cortez, and Robinson Crusoe, pioneers in fact and fiction of modern Europe’s imperialist project. Like them, Hank can be seen as exploiting his technological advantage to impose his will on a more primitive people. He says he wants to free them, not enslave them, and that his goal is a revolution that will make them free without bloodshed, but here again the story his actions tell is at odds with his account of himself. His first public act after becoming the King’s minister is to blow up Merlin’s tower. The tower itself, Hank informs us, was Roman in origin, and so when he has it rebuilt he implicitly links himself with the first imperialists to invade and colonize Britain. More unsettling is that his first public act is an act of violence and that the first “blessing” of progress he brings into this world from the future is gunpowder. No one dies in the tower’s destruction (though the light of the explosion does show “a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground in a general collapse of consternation” (p. 74), but Hank’s Americanizing eventually leads to real casualties. Only a few pages after the great scene in which he lassoes Launcelot, we find Hank using Colt revolvers to gun down knights armed with spears and swords. “The march of civilization was begun” (p. 413) is his comment on this moment. It begins in blood. In a sense it ends with the battle in the novel’s final chapters, when Hank’s deployment of all his technological resources to put down the challenge to his proclaimed republic results in acres of corpses. The sound track of Hank’s adventures in Camelot is as noisy as that of the television coverage of one of America’s wars in the third world, punctuated throughout as it is by the explosions he engineers. It seems like an innocent detail at first, that bullet hole in a suit of armor that Hank claims responsibility for in his conversation with Mark Twain on the very second page of the novel. That bullet hole, however, turns out to be all that remains of his attempts to impose his American values on another culture.

  The ride Twain takes us on in Connecticut Yankee moves in many different directions: toward high-spirited burlesque and angry satire, toward realist novel, toward Europe’s medieval past, toward nineteenth-century American experience, toward patriotic celebration, toward cautionary tale about the dangers of American imperialism. This is already a lot to keep track of, but it is worth adding one more dimension to the novel’s significance for readers and students of Twain—the autobiographical. While novels like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are recognizably about the world Sam Clemens grew up in, none of his fictions can tell us more about Clemens’s adult career as Mark Twain than Hank’s first-person account of his adventures among the Arthurians. Mark Twain and Hank Morgan are both products of Clemens’s imagination. Up to a point, Hank is a carefully created and narratively coherent character like Huck Finn, someone with a voice and perspective of his own that dependably register his background and temperament. When Hank, for example, uses industrial figures of speech like “too much government machinery to oil up” (p. 87), we can hear his experience with and enthusiasm for factories and technology; similarly, when he describes King Arthur in the act of standing up with a metaphor drawn unmistakably from late-nineteenth-century American economic circumstances—“he was up by this time, but a farm could have got up quicker if there was any kind of boom in real estate” (p. 284)—we hear how profoundly Hank’s sense of the world has been conditioned by his allegiance to laissez-faire capitalism. But there are many points at which Twain’s ability to maintain any distance between Hank’s persona and his own personality breaks down. Take the joke that Hank tells us that he heard more often and came to hate more vehemently than any other: “It was about a humorous lecturer who flooded an ignorant audience with the killingest jokes for an hour and never got a laugh” (pp. 91-92). That is not the kind of joke that men tell each other in factories. Or take the way Hank advertises his plan to restore the fountain in the Valley of Holiness: “Doors open at 10:30, performance to begin at 11:25 sharp” (p. 236). Since the event happens outside, there are no doors to open, and since the only way to tell time in Arthurian England is with a sundial, it would be impossible for anyone to know when it was exactly thirty-five minutes before midnight. What both these details have in common is their connection to Twain’s own preoccupations as an entertainer. As he traveled on his various lecture tours, telling “the killingest jokes” to live audiences around the country, the standard advertising slogan for his performances was “Doors open at 7:30; the trouble begins at 8.”

  He was traveling on one such tour, dramatizing excerpts from Huck Finn nightly to thousands of well-dressed men and women, when he started reading Malory and making notes for the story that became Connecticut Yankee. That may help explain why the book reveals so much about what it was like to be Mark Twain—in other words, to be Samuel Clemens performing Mark Twain for his adoring public. Although the narrative does provide a few details of Hank oiling up the machinery of government, it consists mainly of a series of shows that Hank puts on for his sixth-century audiences. His destruction of Merlin’s tower, for example, is carefully advertised and staged in front of a huge crowd of spectators, and most of the novel’s other major scenes are variations on that pattern. The restoration of the fountain, the knights on bicycles, and the joust with Sir Sagramore are all occasions for Hank to display what he calls “the circus side of [his] nature” (p. 130). Clarence even talks about the act of proclaiming the republic as a “performance,” and Hank actually refers to the novel’s final battle as an “entertainment” that begins at dawn. The novel ends with his dying in the act of getting up yet another show-biz “effect.”

  Hank’s very first performance in chapter 6 allows us to see what is at stake in all the shows he puts on. He has been stripped naked and bound to a stake, where he is about to be burned before Camelot’s “seated multitudes”—a surreal literalization of the humorist’s anxiety about dying onstage when his act isn’t working—when the solar eclipse gives him a chance instead to knock‘em dead. When the eyes of the audience turn from the darkening sun back to him, he tells us, “I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up, pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect” (p. 62). “Noble” is a well-chosen adjective: By striking a pose, Hank not only saves his life; he is reborn as a new man who will shortly be named Sir Boss, one of the kingdom’s most exalted figures. Like Mark Twain, Sir Boss is a public persona, the celebrated “somebody” that Hank becomes through his prowess as a showman. But at the same time, the somebody he becomes is somebody else. Readers of Hank’s narrative know him as Hank Morgan, sworn enemy of the Church, the aristocracy, and the primitive superstitions of the times, what he calls “the magic of fol-de-rol.” To the audiences of that time, however, he is known only as Sir Boss, an even mightier wizard than Merlin, a sorcerer who performs miracles like restoring the f
ountain and saving the King that simply increase the public’s faith in magic, in the Church, and in the monarchy. When in chapter 38 the knights ride to the rescue on the bicycles Hank has made for them, he strikes another terrific pose: “‘On your knees, every rascal of you,’” he shouts to yet another Arthurian multitude gathered to watch yet another execution, “‘and salute the King! Who fails shall sup in hell to-night!’ I always use that high style when I’m climaxing an effect” (p. 400). That style is perfectly suited to appeal to his audience’s superstitions, but with its dependence on the ideological power of terms like “King” and “hell,” not to mention the way it commands the people to kneel down, what Hank says is antithetical to his professed commitment to the modern values of democracy and rationality.

  As Sir Boss, Hank moves to center stage among the great figures of the Round Table, but at the same time he travels increasingly further from his own beliefs, his truest self. Hank’s rise from rags to riches, or rather from vulnerable nakedness to the shining splendor of a “nation’s wonder and reverence” (p. 59), is a particularly modern journey. His story resembles the classic European fairy tale in which the poor outcast comes to the castle, passes a trial, becomes a favorite of the king, and wins the hand of the princess. Desire in Twain’s fiction is narcissistic rather than erotic, so the “princess” (the demoiselle Hank calls Sandy) is an afterthought in Connecticut Yankee, but otherwise the way Hank survives the ordeal in chapter 6, “The Eclipse,” to become Arthur’s righthand man fits the classic pattern. The story Twain is telling, however, only begins here, the point at which the fairy tale would end, because in America’s new world, social success and even identity are determined by status, not rank—just as Hank is dubbed Sir Boss by the public, not the king. Because the identity of Sir Boss is enacted rather than fixed, Hank lives anxiously ever after. He must keep putting on new shows—or, as he puts it, performing more miracles—to retain his popularity and sustain the image of the somebody he has become. Hank reminds us that he comes from Connecticut, where the state constitution declares that “all political power is inherent in the people.” On this premise rests the kind of republic Hank wants to set up in Camelot. But the story of Hank’s rise to power and fame also reveals the darker side of democracy’s enthronement of the popular will. In private Hank may be working to set the people of the sixth century free, but in public he keeps deceiving them and betraying his deeper self—because his power depends so completely on giving them what they want, on manipulating rather than challenging their prejudices.