The Portable Mark Twain Page 3

  The Gilded Age is political and social satire, but the character of Colonel Beriah Sellers outshines the invective and is finally more interesting than the convoluted plot of the novel. He is, at any rate, something more than a mere satirical device and better illustrates the impulses behind the venality of a certain kind of American than do Twain’s tales and sketches that explore this theme. Sellers is an altogether memorable creation—part visionary and part windbag; at once calculating and naïve. He is a quixotic braggart, but capable of quickly improvising explanations for events that might permit him some scrap of dignity. He is compromised in his material condition but rich in the affection of his wife and children. “Good gracious, it’s the country to pile up wealth!” he proudly exclaims, but he dines on turnips and water and heats the room with a tallow candle. Sellers is a major stockholder in the soap bubbles of his effervescent imagination and charitably disposed to let others in on the ground floor of his next big deal. There is something majestically helpless about the man that simultaneously commands our sympathy and provokes our laughter.

  Clemens based the character of Colonel Sellers on the personality of his mother’s cousin, James Lampton, but there was a portion of himself in the figure as well. Clemens’s imagination, when it was functioning well, was at once projective and assimilative, which is to say it was a compound of keen observation (of mannerisms, colloquial idiom, gesture, and the like) and a genuine identification with the created character. In his “Autobiography,” he emphasized only half of this equation: “Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.” Samuel Clemens, unique in himself, acknowledged that he was representative, too—representative of material ambition and the desire to be accepted into a social order he had some doubts about, but also of a certain native social and cultural uncertainty vying with an equally native pride and vernacular boisterousness.

  It was audacious, and risky, to announce, as he did in the Preface to The Innocents Abroad (1869), that the purpose of his book was “to suggest to the reader how he would see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.” The author proposes no cultural authority to report on his journey to the Old World and the Holy Land; what he does propose, on the other hand, is more extraordinary—that he can see, feel, and speak for a vast cross-section of the American public and serve as their surrogate abroad. There is, potentially, obnoxious presumption in this claim, but in point of fact, the public embraced the book. The publishers advertised Twain as “The People’s Author,” and if sales figures are any indication, they were right. Almost instantly The Innocents Abroad became a best-seller and remains one of his most popular books.

  What is more, in the course of writing The Innocents Abroad, the “Mark Twain” persona gradually, perhaps imperceptibly, began to become something more than an ad hoc impersonation, outfitted for the purposes of comic vision alone. His original plan was to give a comic account of his voyage with fellow travelers he eventually came to call “pilgrims.” As such, he was playing the part of irreverent journalist, whose imagination was stimulated by direct observation and recent experience. When the terms of his contract required him to produce a book manuscript much longer than he had anticipated, his notes and published “letters” to newspapers had to be supplemented by recollection. One result was that he abandoned the present-mindedness of the reporter for the broader purposes of the imaginative raconteur. He was becoming, almost in spite of himself, a “literary person.”

  This is oversimplification, of course. But the fact remains that much of Twain’s best writing is the work of remembrance. Roughing It (1872) recounted experiences several years old; when “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) was written, Clemens had been away from the river more than a decade; and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a “hymn” to childhood precisely because it consisted of spontaneously youthful adventures recollected in maturity. Tom Sawyer, particularly, is nostalgic in the root sense of the word. There was likely a certain “homesickness” in Twain that motivated him to cast an eye backward to a simpler and mischievously happier time and to picture for the adult reader youth as it is remembered, perhaps at times even as it had been lived. Tom’s free play of his romantic imagination inflicted on his comrades, his successfully conducted pranks or his childish transgressions (followed swiftly by the expected punishment and the equally expected affectionate forgiveness), and his adventures in puppy love were gratifying to the writer and the reader alike.

  There are in Tom Sawyer, of course, sinister elements lurking about the edges of the novel. But what is finally more disturbing than the grotesqueness and the violence in the book is the apparent fact that Tom, for all his puckish defiance of the adult powers that be, is clearly and inevitably becoming neither wise nor mature but merely becoming a grown-up. In that sense, he is an embedded reporter from antebellum St. Petersburg who disturbs but never really challenges the prevailing social order. What is more, in the final chapters he uses his persuasive influence to bring the pariah Huckleberry Finn into the fold. Huck had meandered into the novel swinging a dead cat and having definite thoughts about how to cure warts and was conceived as one more comrade for Tom. To associate with Huck at all is in the eyes of the town an act of insubordination, and as a consequence Tom revels in his company. Nevertheless, Tom envies Huck’s aimless freedom, ignorantly supposing that sleeping in a hogshead and living hand to mouth is blissful relief from constraint. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt Tom’s sincerity when, after the boys return to town to attend their own funeral, he grabs the hand of a shyly retreating Huck and exclaims, “Aunt Polly, it ain’t fair. Somebody’s got to be glad to see Huck.”

  Perhaps it was at that moment that Twain recognized Huckleberry Finn was a fundamentally interesting creation. Originally, Twain wrote a concluding chapter for Tom Sawyer describing Huck’s cramped life at the Widow Douglas’s but eventually removed it from the manuscript. The opening chapter of Huckleberry Finn may in fact be a rewriting of that chapter told from Huck’s point of view. What is more certain, at any rate, is that at some time Twain saw that Huck had his own story to tell and that only he could tell it. In the summer of 1876, apparently as an idle amusement (“more to be at work than anything else,” he claimed), he began to write what he called in a letter to Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” He wrote several hundred manuscript pages that summer but abruptly stopped midway through Chapter 18. “I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got,” he reported, “and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.” He did pigeonhole the work from time to time, only to return to it periodically and to increase the number and significance of Huck’s adventures. By 1883 Twain was personally proud of the result but uncertain of public reception: “I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more,” he told Howells. “And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.”

  When Twain adopted Huck’s point of view, he created a lens through which to view life along the river in the antebellum South, to survey its manners and customs, recreate its superstitions, sentimentality, and vainglorious gestures, its sloth, venality, and violence. Because Huck was not, and did not care to be, part of the social world he so effectively renders in his own distinctive and ungrammatical idiom, he perforce became the author’s satirical instrument. But Huck is a great deal more as well. He admires, or attempts to admire, all manner of affectation, from chalk fruit to Tom Sawyer’s “style” to “The Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” becau
se he automatically assumes the existing order is somehow incontestably right. And precisely to the degree that he is excluded from that world, his earnest but failed attempts to appreciate or understand it create in the adult reader a solid contempt for sham, deception, pretense, and the like.

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an experimental novel, but with a difference. It is an improvisational affair, full of narrative inconsistencies or improbabilities; and a glance at Twain’s working notes for the novel indicate that the selection of episodes to dramatize was almost an arbitrary consideration for him. In that sense, his prefatory “Notice” for the book, that “persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot,” might be taken seriously. In any event, Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece almost in spite of itself. Far from being motivated by a Melvillean devotion to the “great Art of Telling the Truth” or a Jamesean artistic ambition to face the “beautiful difficulty” of dramatic rendering, or even a Poundian desire to “Make It New,” Twain seems to have begun the book as a sport. In the end, Twain did indeed tell a great many truths (“covertly and by snatches,” as Melville said Shakespeare did), and he exhibited a technical mastery over his material that, were he ever disposed to do so, even Henry James might admire. And the book was new in the way Ezra Pound thought modern literature should be. The testimony of a host of American and English writers (Somerset Maugham, H. L. Mencken, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, John Barth, and many, many more) bears witness to the significance of a book that, despite its obvious faults, achieves greatness. Ernest Hemingway’s praise of Huckleberry Finn is the most familiar, but it is also typical: It is “the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

  Evidently conceived as the product of idle leisure, Huckleberry Finn often expressed the author’s personal longings. Twain could envy Huck’s unpestered freedom and identify with his rejection of the torments of “sivilisation,” though life at the Widow’s required only minor concessions of him—mumbling over his victuals, wearing shoes and starched collars, going to school; in a word, behaving. Soon enough, however, the author recognized that Huck’s sensibility and the world he inhabited were far from idyllic. This is no “hymn” to youth; an accurate body count of the dead folks in the book might indicate it is something of a dirge instead. The mounting seriousness of the story begins to come into focus with the introduction of the abusive Pap and continues throughout (in the form of slave catchers, lynch mobs, casual bigots, cruel loafers, aristocratic murderers, mindless feuding families, conniving con men). Still, as vividly drawn as these contemptible characters are, there are no out and out villains in the book; they are not evil-doers, but they have rather blandly been disloyal to their own humanity. Huck sometimes is implicated in the disturbing events of the narrative but as often serves as perplexed witness to them, and in neither case does he reveal a damning moral judgment, merely a confused child-like sympathy. T. S. Eliot astutely observed that Huck really has no imagination but he does have “vision.” Huck “sees the real world; and he does not judge it—he allows it to judge itself.” Condemnation (moral, social, or political) is left for the adult reader; Huck is too busy getting out of one scrape after another.

  His adventures are intermittently punctuated with rare comedy, of course, but at times with unnecessary burlesque as well. It would be a mistake to forget that Huckleberry Finn is a very humorous novel, but at its heart is a troubling moral dilemma. Everything the boy has been taught upholds slavery as a sacred institution and views the slaves themselves as subhuman objects of toil or amusement. So far as he is aware, his decision, or his several decisions really, to help Jim to freedom is in the eyes of the church and the state a sin and a crime. Huck’s diverse encounters with all manner of people along the river are interesting in themselves, but the book simply would not cohere without the presence of the fugitive slave Jim.

  Excepting perhaps Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose exploits Twain knew well, there is no more unlikely fictional pair than Huck and Jim. One is a child; the other, a grown man. One is white; the other, black. One is an unwanted outcast; the other is valuable property, by his own reckoning worth eight hundred dollars. Huck wants to go south, eventually to the Amazon, to get shed of a cruel father, on the one hand, and a superintending guardian, on the other. Jim wants to go north to Canada, work for wages, and buy his family out of slavery. Huck wants to be free from constraint and responsibility; Jim wants the liberty to be a participant in the social order. Huck and Jim have little in common, but together they form, in Twain’s words, a “community of misfortune.” Unable to cultivate what is best in them or to express their freedom except by slipping the knot of necessity, they are collateral damage in the experiment of democracy.

  The characters seem blind to their misfortune, however. If they do not openly question society’s estimation of them, neither are they filled with self-loathing. When they grieve it is not for themselves but for others. Their occasional happiness is nearly always mingled with gratitude. Often their sympathies are misplaced, but they are genuine. Huck, for example, is truly anxious for the safety of the supposedly drunken circus rider, and when Jim learns that the boy “dolphin,” rightful heir to the French throne, was locked up in a cell to die, his heartfelt response is “Po’ little chap.” These are comic mistakes in judgment because Huck and Jim take fictions for fact, but in their own fashion the reactions are as revealing of their fundamental decency as, say, Jim’s self-recrimination for hurting his deaf daughter or Huck’s regret for his cruel deception of Jim after they were separated in the fog. Together, the two know as much about the constitutional machinery of the republic or the failed promises of democracy as they do about British aristocracy or the French language, but their mixed-up exploits nevertheless constitute, in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, a “great drama of interracial fraternity.” As such, they provide, at once, an image of the nation’s possibilities and serve as an emblem of its largely self-inflicted limitations.

  IV

  To say that most everything Twain wrote after Huckleberry Finn is a falling off and that a decline in creative energy corresponded to a darkening pessimism in the man is to repeat a commonplace. It is also to speak a half-truth. To be sure, in his last years Clemens was often skeptical and cynical. By 1894 he had lost his publishing house and had declared bankruptcy. He was humiliated, but he had other worries as well. His wife, Olivia, had always been frail, but her health was more and more uncertain; and Clemens himself had suffered from various ailments for years. He had embarked on a round-the-world lecture tour in 1895, in order to repair his fortunes and, by paying off his debts, to restore his good name. Clemens and his wife were still out of the country when their oldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis in 1896. After a prolonged illness, Olivia died in 1904; Jean, the youngest daughter, died from an epileptic seizure in December, 1909. In addition, Clemens had become disgusted and angry over his country’s chauvinistic swagger and its imperialistic policies, attitudes expressed most powerfully in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), and he believed that the nation had forsaken worthier objectives to satisfy a rapacious greed. In a word, if Twain had turned pessimist, he had his reasons.

  What is more, these subtractions from his life were complemented by a personal determinist philosophy that had been latent in his thinking since the 1870s but came more and more to the fore as an explanatory principle for human conduct and as a means to puncture the balloon of human vanity. The salient features of Clemens’s determinism are these: that thought is merely the mechanical putting together of sense impressions; that human beings are ruled by an interior master, or conscience, which commands us to gratify it; that originality is a myth and all our ideas derive from heredity and temperament or environment and training, and that instinct is merely “petrified thought” passed down from one generation to another. The author thought his “phil
osophy” quite scandalous and took some measures to disclose it without damaging his public image. In point of fact, however, much of what he had to say comported well enough with the conclusions of nineteenth-century science and psychology and there was little, if anything, that was very shocking about it.

  There was a curious discrepancy in his system, however, since, in contradiction of his own mechanical and materialistic assumptions, Twain retained a belief that the mind, or “me,” existed apart from its own mental machinery. That “me” took many forms, apparently. After his daughter Susy’s death, Clemens complained to his friend Howells that he had become a “dead” man, a mere “mud image, & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes, & that has comedy-fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. . . . the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud image & goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it.” In A Connecticut Yankee, he has Hank Morgan proclaim man’s duty in this “sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me.” Elsewhere, he describes this self as a “vagrant thought,” “wandering among the empty eternities.” In a letter to his sister-in-law, Susan Crane (reprinted in this volume), he muses that his whole life might have been a dream and that he has no certain way to prove it otherwise. These are not the musings of an out-and-out materialist who believes human beings are machines and nothing more.