Remembering Twain
Next year marks the 250th year since America’s founders declared our independence from the British. The semiquincentennial of such a world-shaking event offers a unique opportunity to reflect on our revolutionary political order and the distinctive civic character required to uphold and defend it. One particularly fruitful way to approach the American character is to study the greatest citizens our nation has produced, especially those statesmen, soldiers, religious leaders, innovators, explorers, businessmen, artists, and celebrities who adorn our proud history. Those who managed to combine some, if not all, of these into a single, unified life would be especially worthy models for reflection.
In the figure of Mark Twain, we find just such an American. For, while he was hardly a soldier (quite the opposite!), Twain was one of our nation’s greatest geniuses, a rags-to-riches artist whose experience as riverboat pilot, newspaperman, speculator, investor-innovator, and journalistic globe-trotter inspired a brand of democratic fiction that shaped the political and religious imaginations of his countrymen. He was a man who dedicated no small part of his literary energies and personal fortune to advancing technological and scientific innovation, and who, as a result of his fantastic successes and failures—personal, professional, and commercial—became the most famous American of his time. In a country known and admired for its self-made men, the persona “Mark Twain,” the creation of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, may just stand above them all. He is the “self-made man” whose literature helped make America, a one-of-a-kind forgery who forged our character. Reflecting on the political and religious wisdom of this brilliant artist-inventor-explorer-businessman-celebrity should therefore prove an indispensable aid to understanding America and her citizenry.
Enter Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain. The author of celebrated biographies of George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Alexander Hamilton, and J. P. Morgan, Chernow here turns his attention to what he calls “the largest literary personality that America has produced.” But according to Chernow, any account that hopes to do justice to such an expansive personality and “capture both the light and shadow of a beloved humorist who could switch temper in a flash, changing from exhilarating joy to deep resentment,” has a long contract on its hands. It must include Twain’s “inimitable voice, which sparkled even in its darkest moments.” It must capture “the massive breadth of Twain’s interests and travels” while untangling the wild speculations of his commercial enterprises. It must chart his political and moral evolution from backwater Confederate hick to enlightened, progressive Northern reformer. It must grapple with the volatile intensity of his personal loves and hatreds. And, finally, it must face squarely Twain’s admittedly bizarre late-in-life obsession with his “angelfish,” his (by all available accounts) purely platonic relationships with adolescent girls between the ages of ten and fifteen.
To satisfy this sizable task, Chernow produces a hefty history of Twain’s life and works whose sixty-nine chapters he divides into six maritime-themed parts: “Prelude: The Pilot House,” “Afloat,” “Floodtide,” “Rapids,” “Whirlpool,” and “Shipwreck.” And to what port would such a Mississippi-sized navigation of this “venerated emblem of Americana” take us? Our author promises something of an exotic destination. As he writes in his prelude:
Posterity has extracted a sanitized view of a humorous man in a white suit. … But far from being a soft-shoe, cracker barrel philosopher, he was a waspish man of decided opinions delivering hard and uncomfortable truths. His wit was laced with vinegar, not oil. … Holding nothing sacred, he indulged in an unabashed irreverence that would easily create discomfort in our politically correct age. … On the surface his humor can seem merely playful–the caprice of a bright, mischievous child—but the sources of his humor are deadly serious, rooted in a profound critique of society and human nature that gives his jokes their staying power.
For the seasoned traveler who has explored some of Twain’s work and life, or who might be familiar with the scholarship on him, this so-called “discovery” is likely to produce a yawn. That America’s greatest creative genius proves more than a humorist, that his literature was more nuanced, artistically rich, and philosophically attuned than the caricature of him suggests, is well-trod territory. As Christopher Flannery points out in his own excellent review of Chernow’s work, Twain’s philosophic depths were already suspected, if not known, by his first biographer and many of his contemporaries, to say nothing of readers, scholars, and critics over the last century. Indeed, when compared to the Twain biographies produced in just the last twenty years, like the celebrated work of Ron Powers and the brilliant and wonderfully researched three-volume effort by Gary Scharnhorst, Chernow’s Twain appears a lame retread that is as boring as it is long. And at 1,033 pages, that’s saying something.
This is all the more unforgivable as its subject is one of the most fascinating men in American history. To such sins we could add that of unevenness: Chernow crams the first 61 years of Twain’s life and work into 571 pages, devoting the last half of his journey to Twain’s last 14 (and least productive) years.
But it’s not just that Chernow’s uneven Twain tries to explore anew lands already charted by others. It’s that the confused course this work charts leads one astray, giving us a Twain so riven by contradictions and inconsistencies that one can only conclude, as Chernow often does, that this giant of American letters, the man who brought to life the American character through figures like Jim Smiley, Colonel Seller, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Hank Morgan, and the “Mark Twain” of his travelogues, was not himself terribly self-reflective or introspective. But if this were true, then Twain would hardly merit the attention that posterity justly grants him and that Chernow’s book lavishly affords him.
Chernow’s account of Twain could have avoided this difficulty if it simply did justice to the first commandment of its own Prelude and focused on “Twain’s inimitable voice.” For when one hears Twain’s voice and listens not only to what he says but to what he says about what he says, one is forced to conclude that Twain was a man of marvelous indirection and concealment. This is as true of his comments about burlesque, comedy, humor, teaching, preaching, and autobiography as it is of what he says about himself. Thus, in his Autobiography, Twain observed that he exposes “to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions,” concealing “carefully, cautiously, wisely my private ones.” Twain’s indirection is a critical component of his inimitability and constitutes evidence of his incredible personal and artistic self-control.
Because Twain intentionally cultivated so many conflicting views of himself as a writer and personality, he defies any attempt to reduce him to any one of his publicly stated views. If one hopes to get to the truth about “Twain, the artist,” then one must be willing to embrace his apparent contradictions, consider that they might be intentional, and ask why he employs them. Respect for such self-control would also mean tending to the imagery, language, narrative devices, and allusions that Twain deliberately employs throughout his work. Following such a path leads one to Twain’s profound engagement with his contemporaries as well as with the historical, literary, theological, political, and philosophic texts that define the Western intellectual tradition from Homer to Nietzsche, with all of which he was familiar. By seeing how Twain places himself in dialogue with such artists, the reader can better grasp how this consummate American artist situates our revolutionary experiment in self-government within the epic sweep of history and, in doing so, prepares his fellow citizens to reconcile the demands of human flourishing, which are enduring, with a novel regime dedicated to freedom and equality. This approach possesses the added virtue of clarifying Twain’s own poetic form of democratic greatness.
To read Twain as I propose, one must resist the siren song of a hermeneutic that reduces his wonderfully subtle plots and richly complex characters to whatever psychodramas, past or present, the author was allegedly working through. But Chernow embraces such historicism. Whether it’s the trauma caused by a cold and humorless father, the weight of sexual prudery, anxiety over his professional failures and the ever-present threat of poverty, the loss of loved ones, or his lifelong obsession with female purity, Chernow’s Twain uses literature to dramatize and exorcise all of these. Sadly, when his characters become mouthpieces for whatever emotional or ideological grist Twain (presumably) wanted to mill, they lose their humane depth and sacrifice their capacity to speak to us.
Chernow complements this incurious and unimaginative reading of “Twain, the artist” with an equally problematic reading of “Samuel Clemens, the man.” For Chernow, Clemens cuts a tragic figure; he is torn between his pessimism about God and mankind, on one hand, and his profound attachment to justice and moral agency, on the other; between his love for his family and his desire for wealth and popularity, between his concern with social propriety and moral rectitude and the transgressive bent of both his humor and libido, and so on. But such a portrait owes more to “audience capture” than to a careful handling of Chernow’s available sources. Three examples, from small to large, will reveal the problem.
First, in 1877, Twain delivered a set of prepared remarks (known as the “Whittier speech”) in which he comically roasted three of America’s great poets—Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow—all of whom were in attendance. The conventional take, which Chernow repeats, is that the speech bombed, the luminaries were mortified, and Clemens was publicly humiliated, never recovering from the stain of such comic irreverence. But as Gary Scharnhorst demonstrates, the perpetuation of this account is due primarily to William Dean Howells’s recollection of events. Scharnhorst’s review of what was actually said and done suggests that the speech was a mild success, none of the poets were offended, public reaction in the immediate aftermath was largely positive, and, more importantly, Twain’s displays of regret were intentionally overwrought.
Of course, Clemens had a long track record of reinventing himself for public consumption, a habit that implicates his outpourings of emotion. For instance, his written expressions of grief over the deaths of loved ones, like his younger brother Henry, were, as scholars have shown, often worked and reworked to craft an image of himself not entirely consistent with reality. And his expressions of grief over the sudden passing of his daughter Susy appeared to some, in the words of William Macnaughton, “patently contrived, false, melodramatic.” As for the loss of both his copyright and control over his financial affairs, Twain nevertheless engaged an intense social schedule, maintained a sunny disposition, and pursued numerous writing projects. This is not to suggest that Clemens was indifferent to such blows, far from it. It is only to suggest that with him, as with the persona he created, any statement of heartbreak or outward display of emotion must be weighed against the strength of soul that belongs to an artist of his awesome creative energies. Chernow never does this.
Finally, there’s Clemens’s alleged Victorian morality. Chernow repeatedly refers to him as a prude. But to maintain this position, Chernow must ignore evidence of Clemens’s randy behavior in the mining towns of his youth, his trips to “spas” that treated venereal diseases, his repeated presence at burlesque shows, and his crack about giving odor to odorless condoms, all of which are, again, amply documented by others. On top of that, Chernow never adequately explains why someone so wary of sexual improprieties might give his fiancée a book that he “criticizes” for its vulgarity (Don Quixote), or obsessively reread Samuel Pepys’s lewd Diary, or compose and circulate bawdy works like 1601, Letters from Earth, and “The Science of Onanism,” or create gender-bending literary heroes or fraternize publicly with disgraced homosexuals (Oscar Wilde). And that’s without exploring a body of fiction through whose veiled lines an education of human eros Clemens-as-Twain subtly limns.
In the end, it seems that Twain gives us plenty of reasons to suspect that his internal life, much like his writings, possessed greater coherence and unity than Chernow would have his readers believe. If there is a tragedy here, it is not to be found in Twain’s allegedly conflicted soul, but in those who misread the man and his work and thus miss out on the prospects for political and psychic unity that his literature makes available to the citizens of our modern democracy. Chernow’s biography denies us the gift that Mark Twain would so generously bestow on his fellow Americans. For her 250th birthday, America deserves better.