--PAGE_BREAK--For two years after that Clemens turned his wheel atop the taxes deck, drawing a licensed pilot's high wages, while he gained postgraduate schooling inhuman nature. Oft quoted is his later assertion: «When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.» A born worrier, he felt the responsibility that lay within a pilot's hands as he steered past narrows and snags and sand bars, or for the sake of divstige raced his rivals until the boiler nearly burst under its head of steam. His old master, many years later, stated that Clemens «knew the river like a book, but he lacked confidence.» One may speculate whether a very human incertitude, deep in his being, did not chime with a classic type of humor in his constant self-portrayal as the man who gets slapped: the bumptious yet timid cub of Life on the Mississippi; the fear-bedeviled soldier of «The Campaign That Failed»; the tenderfoot of Roughing It, setting forest fires and just missing wealth through sheer stupidity; or the harassed traveler losing his tickets, browbeaten by porters and shopkeepers, falling foul of the authorities, who appears in a long sequence from the juvenile Snodgrass letters to A Tramp Abroad.
Clemens' career on the river ended in the spring of 1861 with the outbreak of hostilities. With brief enthusiasm he joined a Confederate militia band, savoring the boyish conspiracy of war in its early stages. In the lack of discipline the band soon broke up; and Sam, with qualms about fighting for slavery, yielded to persuasion from his Unionist brother Orion, lately appointed Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. In July, 1861, the two set out for the West. The outlines of the story told in Roughing If are true enough: the nineteen-day trip across the plains and Rockies to Carson City; an attack r mining fever that left Sam none the richer; his acceptance of a job on the Vll«ginia City Enterprise; a journalist's view of San Francisco in flush times; and a newspaper-sponsored voyage to the Sandwich Islands. His dream of becoming a millionaire by a stroke of fortune never forsook him; lingering ift
his blood, the bonanza fever made him a lifelong victim of gold bricks, quick profit schemes, and dazzling inventions. But his return to journalistic humor the vein he had worked in his late teens and early twenties, imitative of such professional humorists as Seba Smith, J. J. Hooper, and B. P. Shillaber ' whose productions every newspaper office abounded—proved to be his real] lucky strike. In 1863 the Missourian of twenty-eight met Artemus Ward o the latter's Western lecture tour, and watched a master storyteller in action-the adroit timing, change of pace, and deadpan obliviousness to the point of one's own wit. Twain's „How to Tell a Story“ (1895) acknowledges these profitable lessons.
It was Ward who encouraged him to seek a wider audience than the redshirted miners of Washoe and nabobs of the Golden Gate. The first fruit of this encouragement to appear in the East—a piece of jocular sadism against the small fry who made day and night hideous at resort hotels, „Those Blasted Children“—was printed early in 1864 by the New York Mercury Meanwhile in 1863 Clemens had begun to imitate current funny men like Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Josh Billings, by selecting a pen name, the river-boat man's cry for two fathoms, „Mark Twain.“ Clemens stoutly maintained he appropriated it soon after an eccentric pilot-journalist of New Orleans Captain Isaiah Sellers, relinquished it by death. No contribution in the New Orleans divss, however, has ever been found under that name; also, Sellers' death occurred a year after Clemens adopted this pseudonym. Whether original or borrowed, the name served an important purpose. It created an alter ego, a public character, which Clemens could foster through the years while doffing it in private as he pleased. It set definable limits to his role of being what the age called a „phunny phellow.“ A speculative critic might guess that his abiding interest in transposed identities, twins, and Siamese prodigies mirrored a dualism which self-observation would have shown running like a paradox through his nature: gullible and skeptical by turns; realistic and sentimental, a satirist who gave hostages to the established order, a frontiersman who bowed his neck obediently to Victorian mores, and an idealist who loved the trappings of pomp and wealth. Incessantly he contradicted himself on a variety of subjects. His was not a single-track mind, but a whole switcn-yard. The creation of two more or less separate identities—Clemens the sensitive and perceptive friend, Mark Twain the robust and astringent humorist springing from the same trunk of personality, helped to make him like those ligatured twins in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Luigi and Angelo, „a human philopena.“
2.2 Beginning of literary career, Twains first successful experiences
Under the name of Mark Twain the wild-haired Southwesterner began to contribute to the divss yarns swapped about the legislative halls of Carso, the bars and billiard parlors of San Francisco, and the hot stoves of miners on Jackass Hill. From these last, about February, 1865, he first heard the old folk tale of the Jumping Frog. To the anecdote he added the salt of human values which the genre usually Sacked, in garrulous Simon Wheeler and simple Jim Smiley the Frog's owner. Published in the Saturday Press of Kew York, November 18,1865, it was swiftly broadcast. The author grumbled in a letter home about the irony of riding high on „a villanous backwoods sketch,“ but already he was tastingjhat sense of popularity_which soon came to be his elixir of life. In October, 1866, back from Honolulu and planted on a San Francisco lecture platform, he first encountered another powerful stimulant, the instant response. Early in 1867, at Cooper Union in New York, he won his eastern spurs, and began to be hailed as rightful heir to Artemus Ward, lately dead of tuberculosis in England. Soon, as his friend William Dean Howells phrased it, Twain learned „all the stops of that simple instrument, man.“ The lecturer's effect upon the writer was great. Increasingly Twain came to write by ear, testing his books by reading aloud, while making the expanded anecdote or incident the unit of his literary composition. Sometimes, of course, without benefit of his infectious personal charm, that mane of fiery red hair and hawklike nose, the gestures of an artist's hands, and the inflections of that irresistible drawl, a reader of cold print missed qualities which on the platform redeemed humor of a perishable sort.
»When I began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard," he told the biographer Archibald Henderson. After his first volume, of chiefly Western sketches, named The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1867), he reinforced this reputation by distilling a humorous travelogue out of the letters sent back to the Alta California from his cruise to the Mediterranean and Holy Land on the Quaker City in 1867. Comic capital was readily furnished by the flood of tourists, affluent merchants and their wives, war profiteers, former army officers on holiday, and clergymen for whom Jerusalem justified the junket, which swept over the Old World after Appomattox. Knowing themselves to be innocents, they faced down their provincialism by brag and cockalorum, and haggling over prices. Mark Twain gladly joined them, joking his way among the shrines and taboos of antiquity, comparing Como unfavorably with Tahoe, bathing in the Jordan, finding any foreign tongue incredibly tunny, and pitying ignorance, superstition, and lack of modern conveniences. 1 he Innocents Abroad (1869) helped to belittle our romantic allegiance to turope, feeding our emergent nationalism. Instantly a best seller, it delighted ^nose Americans in whom «the sense of Newport» (as Henry James later Called it) had never been deeply engrafted. A slender minority like James himself felt that Mark Twain amused only primitive persons, was the Phji-tines' laureate. Years later, in 1889, in a letter to Andrew Lang, Twain WouU glory in this charge:
Indeed I have been misjudged, from the first. I have never tried in even single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for ' either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that directin ' but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately trf H to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them. Yes, you see I have always catered for the Belly and the Members.
Yet this is not the whole story. From an early date, Mark Twain, the playboy of the Western world, had begun to feel the aspirations of an artist, to crave deeper approval than had come to the cracker-box humorist like Sam Slick and Jack Downing. In Honolulu in 1866 the diplomat Anson Burlin-game gave him advice by which the aged Twain avowed he had lived «for forty years»: «Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb.» On the Quaker City voyage the Missourian fell under the refining spell of «Mother» Fairbanks, wife of a prosperous Ohio publisher, and tore up those travel letters which she thought crude. Always enjoying petticoat dominion, he eagerly sought her approval of the revised Innocents and was enchanted when she pronounced it
«authentic.» «A name 1 have coveted so long—and secured at last!» be exclaimed. "/ don't care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end and aim of my ambition is to he authentic—is to be considered authentic." In a similar thirst for higher recognition he told Howells, reviewer of Innocents in the Atlantic: «When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had corne white.» Nevertheless, as Twain found to his intermittent chagrin, his reputation throughout life kept returning to that of a «phunny phellow,» turning cartwheels to captivate the groundlings—until at length he built up the defensive attitude exdivssed to Lang. At Atlantic dinners, the author of «Old Times on the Mississippi» and Tom Sawyer found himself seated below the salt, ranked by Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier, as well as by such adopted sons of Boston as Howells and Aldrich. Despite the new decorum of his life and the growing richness of his art, the wild man from the West was expected, some time, somehow, to disgrace himself. And, by the meridian of Boston, he eventually did so, when at the celebrated Whittier birthday dinner on December 17, 1877, he made his speech of innocent gaiety about three drunks in the high Sierras who personated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes. The diners were shocked, refusing their laughter while he stood solitary (as Howells said) «with his joke dead on his hands.» The next day or so, when Twain's haunting distrust of himself and his own taste had induced a penitential hangover, he sent apologies; writing characteristically: «Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. gut then I am God's fool, and all his works must be contemplated with respect.» He then begged Howells to exclude him from the Atlantic for a while, in the interest of readers' good will. The gravity with which both the saints and the sinner regarded this incident reveals the massiveness of the genteel tradition in New England and the probationary status upon which Mark was kept for so many years.
Between the publication of the Innocents and this indiscretion, Clemens had taken a wife whose remolding influence has been the subject oЈ much debate. The story of their courtship is familiar: his first sight of her delicate face in a miniature carried by betrothal while her father, the richest businessman in Elmira, and her kin were slowly won over; and their wedding early in 1870, with Clemens the bridegroom trying unsuccessfully to establish himself as a solid newspaper editor in Buffalo, but moving to Hartford in 1871 to resume a free-lance life. His veneration of women and their purity was almost fanatical. «I wouldn't have a girl that / was worthy of,» he wrote «Mother» Fairbanks before his engagement. «She wouldn't do.»
About the sexual make-up of Mark Twain speculation has been indulged since the Freudian era. In that famous sophomoric sketch 1601, written in mid-career to amuse his clerical friend Joe Twichell, he had Sir Walter Raleigh describe «a people in ye uttermost parts of America, y* copulate not until they be five-St-thirty years of age.» This, it happens, was the age when Clemens married a semi-invalid wife, as if some inadequacy in himself, some low sexual vitality, made such a woman his fitting mate. And yet respecting their physical love for each other and the fruitfulness of their union, with its four children, no doubt can be raised. What illicit experience might have come to a boy growing up in the accessible world of slavery, and passing his green manhood upon river boats and in bonanza towns, can only be guessed at. In later years, respecting the idealized Hannibal of his boyhood, he went so far as to deny the existence of sexual irregularities; and by confine-mg his two great novels about Hannibal to adolescence he was able in a banner to carry his point. Obviously certain taboos about sex, personal as well as conventional, appear in his writings from beginning to end. Unlike friend Howells, he attempted no probing of desire, no analysis of the affinity between man and woman beyond the calf love of Tom and Becky and [he implausible treatment of Laura the siren of The Gilded A Only under the protective shield of miscegenation, in the person of warm-blooded Negress Roxana Wilson, does he venture approach passion which overleaps". Joan of virgin of exquisite purity plainly is the heroine after his inmost heart fear of sex, like the shrinking of primitive races and some adolescent from carnality as if it meant degradation of the body, seems to lie at the roar of Mark Twain's nature. The exceptions of his occasional bawdry—in and a few unprinted works like his speech before the Stomach Club in Paris and his manuscript «Letters from the Earth»—but prove the rule, in ridiculing the body and its ways sufficiently to suit the most fanatic Puritan.
Yet Twain was in no sense a misogynist. He loved the company of women, of the refined women whose tastes and restraints fitted his own divsuppositions about them. His understanding of the feminine mind has left no more delightful evidence than «Eve's Diary,» written in 1905 shortly after Olivia's death, so that Adam's final bereavement becomes the epitaph of his own loss: «Wherever she was, there was Eden.»[1] In summary, Mark Twain's personal make-up and the conventions of gentility surrounding the kind of success he aspired to, joined to supdivss the recognition of sex as a key motive in human actions—leaving woman not an object of desire but of reverential chivalry.
3.2 Marriage and wife’s influence onto Mark twain’s literary works
The effect of his wife upon Twain the artist has provoked latter-day discussion. One school of thought holds that Clemens was forced, first by his mother and then by his wife, to «make good,» i.e., to make money and be respectable. Moreover, thanks to the censorship of his wife, they say, he became not the New World Rabelais but a frustrated genius incapable of calling his soul or vocabulary his own. It is clear, however, that proof of Livy's «humiliating» dominion rests largely upon Twain's letters to Howells: that pair of devoted husbands married to invalids who made a gallant little joke over being henpecked. The notion that women exercised a gentle tyranny over their men folk, for the latter's good, always appealed to Mark Twain, schooled in Western theories that man was coarser clay and woman a rare and special being (as among the Washoe miners in Roughing It, who chipped m $2,500 in gold as a gift at the miraculous sight of a live woman). All his late new encouraged women to reform him improve his taste and manners. His three little daughters who shared in the family rite knout as «dusting on Papa, and the „angel-fish“ of adolescent girls in his Bermudian Indian summer, were among the youngest of the sex whose devoted slave he rejoiced to was a kind oЈ game in the feudal tradition, which he adored. But to assure therefore that Twain the genius was henpecked, baffled, unmanned by women in general and Livy in particular is to convert a jest into a cry to agnate converse influence of husband upon wife something deserves to be aid Twain's vitality rescued her from abysses of timorous living, his banter relaxed her serious disposition, and his religious skepticism destroyed her Christian faith.
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--PAGE_BREAK--as for the specific question of censorship, we know that Twain liked to read aloud en jailed the results to his daily composition, usually meeting the approval he craved, sometimes encountering a chill disfavor to which he was equally sensitive. He was a poor self-critic and knew it. He plunged into •writing without much plan or foresight. Levy’s judgment in matters of simple good taste and in pruning wordiness and irrelevance was clearly superior to his own in the heat of incubation. A careful examination of his manuscripts shows that Mrs. Clemens, like that other long-standing adviser William Dean Howells, objected to certain vivid words and phrases— «wallow,» «bowels,» «spit,» «rotten,» and realistic allusions to stenches and putrefaction which always tempted Mark Twain, so that he grumbled about her «steadily weakening the English tongue»—but that in mild profanities (like Huck Finn's «comb me all to hell'') and in rare inclinations toward the risquй (such as the farce of „The Royal Nonesuch“) the author on second thought was his own most attentive censor. He was not above playing an occasional hazard with his critics to see how far he could skate on thin ice; then doubled on his own track back to safety. Just as he dreamed of the unabashed nakedness of a boy's freedom on a raft floating down the Mississippi, now and again he yearned for the lusty old ways of medieval speech, „full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies,“ „good old questionable stories,“ as the Connecticut Yankee says. But quickly he reminded himself, as he observes in A Tramp Abroad, that the license of the printed word had been „sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.“ To this curb in the main he gave unstinting consent.
Up to the time of his anchorage in Hartford in 1871, the most important facts about Mark Twain are the things that happened to him, shaping his development as an artist and filling the granaries of memory. After that date the chief milestones are the books he wrote out of that accumulation. His maturity and self-assurance can be gauged, growing from book to book through the next two decades, as he lectured at home and abroad, met the captains of literature and politics and finance, read widely if desultorily, and Perfected his early journalistic manner until it became one of the great styles American letters—easy, incisive, sensitive to nuances of dialect, rich in the resources of comedy, satire, irony, and corrosive anger.
The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) he learned, under emancipation from newspaper reporting, to take greater liberties with fact for art's sake. Both books owe such structure as they have to a rough chronology. Upon this thread Mark Twain the raconteur strings one story after another. The latter volume offers us almost all the classic types which Americans in general, frontiersmen in particular, had long since favored: the tall tale, the melodramatic shocker, the yarn of pointless garrulity, humor, the canard of impossible coincidence, the chain of free association that wanders farther and farther from its announced subject; the comedy of man in his cups, the animal fable, and the delusions of a lunatic. Paradox, surprise and understatement often heighten his effects. Anecdote continues to be the fiber of those later travel books, which show more fluency in repeating the essential pattern, but grow in world-weariness after the early gusto of the Innocents and the Argonauts. They include A Tramp Abroad (1880), with more travesty of European languages, guide books, and art criticism, and Following the Equator (1897), which reports Twain's lecture tour in Australia and India. Inevitable become his burlesques of sentimental poetry, parodies of romantic situations, yarns picked up in new places or recollected from the limbo of years. In this last book, however, flippancy at the expense of peoples and customs vanishes when the traveler reaches the threshold of Asia, as if the ancient disillusioned torpor of that continent had stricken the satirist dumb. These travelogues do not show Twain's gifts to greatest advantage. Flashes of notable writing occur, but intrinsically they are the potboilers of a master improviser.
4.2.The earliest novel he attempted was The Gilded Age, in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, published late in 1873, just as the panic was ringing down the curtain upon the worst excesses of that age. It harks back to their common knowledge of Missouri, where Warner had been a surveyor, and to Twain's passing observation of Washington in the winter of 1867-1868,[2] when after return from the Holy Land he had served briefly and unhappily as private secretary to pompous Senator William Stewart of Nevada and more successfully had begun to write humorous commentaries on the news (antici-pative of the late Will Rogers) for the Tribune and the Herald of New York. This phase left him with an abiding scorn for politicians, their intelligence and honesty. (»Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can, is as characteristic as the remark that we have «no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.») Beside the bungling amateurs of Carso City, these were graduates in graft, scrambling for the spoils of what a lat -(critic termed the Great Barbecue. This same spectacle of post-bellum Winton which sickened fastidious Henry Adams and led even Whitman to optimist to pen the darker pages of Democratic Vistas, gave Mark Twain his first shining target for satire.
Warner supplied conventional plot elements of romance, gentility, pluck and luck, harmonized with the theme of material success, which the novel debunks at one level but praises fulsomely at another, when it is sanctioned by what passes among the majority as honesty. Twain himself was always dazzled by the romance of fortune, especially if it followed the ascent from rags to riches, as he shows in a story like «The Ј1,000,000 Bank Note» (1893). Yet he was aware of the ironies and unhappiness springing from the root of all evil, as revealed in «The $50,000 Bequest» (1904) and most superbly in «The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg» (1899). In The Gilded Age the authors' wavering purpose resembles a mixture of Jonathan Swift and Horatio Alger. Satiric punches are pulled by the constant impulse to strike out in all directions but follow through in none. The vulgarity of a chromo civilization and the urge to keep up with the Joneses mingle with churchly hypocrisy, pork-barrel politics, high tariff, oratorical buncombe, abuse of the franking privilege, bribery, personal immorality in high places, profiteers of «shoddy,» and the wider degradation of the democratic dogma.
The Gilded Age is clearly a world of optimistic illusion, proudly putting its best foot forward though the other limp behind in a shabby mud-bespattered boot. In the backwoods, stagecoaches with horns blowing enter and leave town at a furious clip, but once out of sight «drag along stupidly enough»—even as steamboats burn fat pine to make an imdivssive smoke when they near port. Credit is the basis of society; a typical parvenu boasts; «I wasn't worth a cent a year ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.» Most engaging specimen of this psychology is Colonel Sellers, a New World Micawber, who deals in imaginary millions while he and the family dine off turnips and cold water (man's best diet, he loftily assures them), and warm themselves at a stove through whose isinglass door flickers the illusory glow of a candle. Drawn from Twain's Uncle James Lampton, the Colonel is an epitome of the American dream that remains a mirage—impulsive, generous, hospitable, and scheming to enrich not only himself but relatives and friends, and incidentally benefit all humankind, a colossal failure who basks forever in the rush light of the success cult. Not dishonest by nature, in the heady milieu of Washington he begins to apologize for bribery («a harsh term»), while hitching his wagon to the baleful star of Senator Dilworthy, drawn roan the lineaments of Kansas' notorious Pomeroy. In certain passages Mark win’s irony is whetted to a cutting edge, but the book's total effect is tar. In many ways both authors were children of the Gilded Age, resuscitate him. The modest laurels of a dramatic version of The Gilded Age, produced in 1874, led Twain and Howells to attempt in 1883 an hailer' sequel which, however, the stage Sellers of the earlier script, John T, declined to play because that character had been exaggerated brink of lunacy. The plot, as embalmed in Twain's novel, The Anieri Claimant (1892)[3], justifies the actor's verdict. It is one of the humorist's m strained and least successful efforts.
5.2 Critical analysis of “Adventures of Tom Sawyer”
Three years after The Gilded Age Twain published Tom Sawyer, the first of three great books about the Mississippi River of his youth. Beyond question, Huckleberry Finn (1885), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Tom Sawyer (1876) are, in that order, his finest works. The reasons for their superiority are not far to seek. In plotting a book his structural sense was always weak; intoxicated by a hunch, he seldom saw far ahead, and too many of his stories peter out from the author's fatigue or surfeit. His wayward technique as Howells recognized, came close to free association:
So far as I know, Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow.
This method served him best after he had conjured up characters from long ago, who on coming to life wrote the narrative for him, passing from incident to incident with a grace their creator could never achieve in manipulating an artificial plot. In travel books and other autobiography written under the heat of recent experience, Mark Twain seemingly put in everything, mixing the trivial, inane, and farcical with his best-grade ore. But in the remembrance of things past, time had dissolved the alloy, leaving only gold. The nostalgia for a youth's paradise «over the hills and far away,» for the fast-vanishing freedom of the West, appealed deeply to the age of boyhood sentiment enriched by Longfellow and Whittier. It also led to Mark Twain's strength; namely, the world of the senses and physical action. What he felt was always better exdivssed than what he had thought or speculated about. A boy's world freed him from those economic and political perplexities, adult dilemmas and introspections, where in rages and knotty casuistries he lost the sureness o touch that came to him through the report of his five senses or through the championship of justice when the issue was as simple as the conflict between bullies and little folk.
Jan his heart Mark Twain must have realized that essentially he was a man feeling, too sensitive to serve merely as a comedian, too undisciplined to philosopher he sometimes fancied himself. His forte was to recapture «his sheer joy of living, when to be young was very heaven. A great river flowing through the wilderness set the stage for a boy's own dream of selfefficiency, of being a new Robinson Crusoe on Jackson's Island. In the background moved the pageantry of life, colored by humor, make-believe, and melodrama; but the complexity of the machine age and the city lay far, far away.
Mark Twain did not write his first books about this dream world, but let he haze of ideality collect about it, reserving it luckily for the high noon of his powers. Apparently the first hint oЈ this motif comes in one of his New ' York letters to the Alta California, in the spring of 1867, in which he happens to recall the town drunkard of Hannibal, Jimmy Finn (destined to return as Huck's father), and also the Cadets of Temperance which Sam Clemens joined in order to march in funeral processions wearing their red scarf. This latter incident crops up in Tom Sawyer. Shortly afterward in The Innocents, among the pleasures and palaces of Europe, Twain interpolated other boyhood memories. In February, 1870, on receiving a letter from his „first, and oldest and dearest friend“ Will Bowen, one of the flesh-and-blood components of Tom Sawyer, he sat down under the spell of the past and wrote a reply calling up some eight scenes which later appear in Tom Sawyer and Hackle-berry Finn. Around this time he wrote a nameless sketch about a romantic lovesick swain who beyond question is Tom Sawyer. Designated as „Boy's Manuscript“ by Twain's first editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, it was not published until 1942 in Bernard De Veto's Mark Twain at Wolf. Some four years later Twain made a fresh start, scrapping the earlier diary form in favor of third-person narrative. By midsummer, 1875, it was done, and off the divss late in the next year (a few months after Clemens with his usual inconsistency had written Will Bowen a stern letter on August 31, 1876, bidding him dwell no more in the sentimental never-never land of boyhood, denying that the past holds anything „worth pickling for divsent or future use“). In this latter year Twain began Huckleberry Finn as a sequel, laid it aside during six years, went back to the story after his visit to Hannibal in 1882, and bushed it a little over two years later.
The first reader of Tom Sawyer, William Dean Howells, disagreed with the author that he had written a book for adults only. He quickly persuaded twain that it was primarily a story for boys, which would gad over their shoulder. Twain therefore withdrew a few gibes against Sunday schools and turned several phrases that smacked of backwoods frankness. Nothing of importance, however, was altered, nor did Tom suffer from transformation into the neat, obedient paragon which fiction for the so long had held up to their resentful gaze. The first chapter announces the Tom „was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy well though — and loathed him.“ The only resemblance Tom bears to t-K fictional creations of his time is in sensibility: he yields to self-pity relish every neighborhood tear shed over his supposed drowning, and almost fail upon hearing that even a villain like Injun Joe has been sealed in the ca Otherwise, our hero is of very different mettle. He steals from and Aunt Folly luxuriates in idleness, missives in church, huffs and like his friend Huck employs lying as protective coloration in a world of adult tyrants. Consequently, in some American homes the new book was read by grown-ups, then tucked away out of a boy's reach; its successor Huckleberry Finn, soon after publication was ejected from the town library of Concord, Massachusetts (where, a generation before, John Brown had been welcomed by Thoreau and Emerson), because Huck elected to „go to Hell“ rather than betray his friend, a runaway Negro.
In 1870 Thomas Bailey Aldrich had published his mild Story of a Bad Boy;[4] twenty years later Twain's friend Hovels would reminisce of adolescents not too bright or good for human nature's daily food in A Boy's Town; a little later came Stephen Crane's recollections of Whilom Ville and William Alien White's of Bayville. They helped maintain the tradition of realism. In extreme recoil from priggishness, a line beginning with Peck's Bad Boy in 1883 flaunted incorrigibility above all. It is possible to overstress the picaresque intent of Tom Sawyer in turning upside down the world of Peter Parley and the Rolla books, or its analogues with that still greater novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, in which some critics find the model of Tom the dreamer and Huck his commonsense henchman. Mark Twain's verisimilitude should not be overlooked in this search for „purpose.“ He wrote about boys from having been one in the Gilded Age, in a river town before the war.
To a stranger in 1887 he described this book as „simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air.“ These lads no more resemble Peck's Bad Boy than they do the model children of that improving story-teller, Jacob Abbott. Within a framework of superb dialogue and setting, of sensitive perceptions that turn now and again into poetry, against a background where flicker shadows of adult humanitarianism and irony, Tom and Huck grow visibly as we follow them. The pranks and make-believe of early chapters-whitewashing the fence, releasing a pinch bug in church, playing pirate in Tom Sawyer, and in its sequel the rout of a Sunday school picnic under the guise of attacking a desert caravan — are dimmed as the human values deepen and occasional moral issues appear. The Tom who takes Becky's punishment in school, and testifies for the innocent Muff Potter at risk of the murderer revenge, parallels the development of Huck from a happy-golucky gamine epitome of generosity and loyalty.
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--PAGE_BREAK--6.2 “Huckleberry Finn” as the most significant work
Mark Twain makes no account of consistencies in time. His boys vary between the attitudes of nine-year-ids and those of thirteen or fourteen, despite the fact that Tom Sawyer 's time is one Missouri summer, and that of Huckleberry Finn a few more broken months. Like the creator of perennial comic-strip characters, Twain syncopates the march of time as he pleases. In the latter novel he also ignores the fact that Nigger Jim could have escaped by swimming across to the free soil of Illinois early in the book, and commits other sins against literalism which he would have ridiculed unmercifully in the pages of his noire James Fennimore Cooper.
Huckleberry Finn is clearly the finer book, showing a more mature point of view and exploring richer strata of human experience. A joy forever, it is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of American and of world literature. Here Twain returned to his first idea of having the chief actor tell the story, with better results. Huck's speech is saltier than Tom's, his mind freer from the claptrap of romance and sophistication. Huck is poised midway between the town-bred Tom and that scion of wood lore and primitive superstition Nigger Jim, toward whom Huck with his margin of superior worldliness stands in somewhat the same relation that Tom stands toward Huck. When Tom and Huck are together, our sympathy turns invariably toward the latter. A homeless river rat, cheerful in his rags, suspicious of every attempt to civilize him, Huck has none of the unimportant virtues and all the essential ones. The school of hard knocks has taught him skepticism, horse sense, and a tenacious grasp on reality. But it has not toughened him into cynicism or crime. Nature gave him a stanch and faithful heart, friendly to all underdogs and instantly hostile toward bullies and all shapes of overmastering power. One critic has called him the type of the common folk, sample of the run-of-the-mill democracy in America. Twain himself might have objected to the label, for him once declared «there are no common people, except m the highest spheres of society.» Huck always displays frontier neighborliness, even trying to provide a rescue for three murderers dying marooned on a wrecked boat, because «there isn’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I like it?» Money does not tempt him to betray his friend Nigger Jim, though at times his conscience is troubled by the voice of convention, divaching the sacredness of property — in the guise of flesh and blood — and he trembles on the brink of surrender. Nor can he resist sometimes the provocation offered by Jim's innocent sedulity, only to be cut to the quick when his friend bears with dignity the skivers that his trustfulness has been made game of. Even as Huck surpasses Tom in qualities of courage and heart, so Nigger Jim excels even
Huck in fidelity and innate manliness, to emerge as the book's character.
Sam Clemens himself (who in the first known letter he wrote his on the day he reached New York in August, 1853,[5] had indulged the sarcasm, «I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern Stat niggers are considerably better than white people») learned in time, much Huck learns, to face down his condescension. In later years he became warm friend of the Negro and his rights. He paid the way of a near student through Yale as «his part of the reparation due from every white t every black man,» and savagely attacked King Leopold of Belgium for the barbarities of his agents in the Congo. Mrs. Clemens once suggested as a mollifying rule to her husband, «Consider everybody colored till he is proved white.» Howells thought that as time went on Clemens the South westerner was prone to lose his Southern but cleave to his Western heritage, finding his real affinities with the broader democracy of the frontier. On other issues of race divjudice, Twain looked upon the Jew with unqualified admiration defended the Chinese whom he had seen pelted through the streets of San Francisco, and confessed to only one invincible antipathy, namely, against the French—although his most rhapsodic book was written in praise of their national heroine.
The final draft of Huckleberry Finn was intimately bound up with the writing of Twain's third great volume about his river days, Life on the Mississippi. Fourteen chapters of these recollections had been published in the Atlantic in 1875; before expanding them into a book Twain made a memorable trip in 1882 back to the scenes of his youth. In working more or less simultaneously on both long-unfinished books, he lifted a scene intended for Huckleberry Finn—about Huck and the craftsmen—to flavor the other book, but the great gainer from his trip was not the memoir but the novel. The relative pallor of Life on the Mississippi, Part II, is due in a measure to the fact that so much lifeblood of reminiscence is drained off into the veins of Huckleberry Finn. The travel notes of 1882, written up soon after Twain s return home, are suffused with some of the finest situations in his novel: the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, Colonel Sherborn and the mob, and the two seedy vagabonds who come on-stage as the Duke and the King, with a posse in their wake, who «said they hadn't been doing nothing, and was being chased for it.»
Mark Twain's renewed contact with life among the river towns quickened his sense of realism. For Huckleberry Finn, save in its passages about the peace and freedom of Jackson's Island, is no longer «simply a hymn,» and so dim has grown the dream of adolescent romancing that Becky Tactic reappears but perfunctorily under the careless label of «Bessie» Thatcher essay Huck's voyage through the South reveals aspects of life darker than the occasional melodrama of Tom Sawyer. We are shown the and of poor white jack woods loafers with their plug tobacco and Barlow dogs on stray sows and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise," or drench a stray cur with turpentine and set him afire. We remark the cowardice of lynching «parties» the chicanery of patent medicine fakers, revivalists, and exploiters of rustic ribaldry; the senseless feedings of he gentry. In the background broods fear: not only a boy's apdivhension of -hosts, African superstitions, and the terrors of the night, nor the adults' dread of black insurrection, but the endless implicated strands of robbery, floggings, drowning, and murder. Death by violence lurks at every bend of road or river. Self-divservation becomes the ruling motive, squaring perfectly with the role of the principal characters, Huck the foot-loose orphan and his friend Jim the fugitive—puny in all strengths save loyalty, as they wander among the boots of white adult sudivmacy. The pair belongs to the immortals of fiction.
«Never keen at self-criticism, Mark Twain passed without soundings from these depths to the adjacent shallows of burlesque and extravaganza. The last fifth of this superb novel, Huckleberry Finn, brings back the romantic Tom Sawyer, with a hilarious, intricate, and needless plot for rescuing Jim from captivity. The story thus closes upon the farcical note with which the Hannibal cycle has begun, in the whitewashing episode. On the same note many years later Mark Twain tried to revive his most famous characters, in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), with Tom, Huck, and Jim as passengers of a mad balloonist and their subsequent adventures in Egypt. Though inferior to its great divdecessors, this book does not lack humor, gusto, and rich characterization. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)[6] dishes up a melodrama of stolen diamonds, double-crossing thieves, and that immortal device of Plaits and Shakespeare, identical twins, whose charm custom could not stale for Mark Twain. Here haste artifice, and creative fatigue grow painfully apparent.
Uneven quality appears in even though it came at the high tide of his powers. Chapters IV-XVII was written for the Atlantic after Twain's chance reminiscences led his friend twitchily to exclaim, „What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!“ Fresh, vivid, humorous, they recall the great days of river traffic: the problems of navigation, the races, the pilots' association, the resourcefulness and glory of the old-time pilot. The addenda, which came after Twain's return to the river for „copy,“ sometimes attain the former standard—the description of Pilot Brown the scold, or the account of the Pennsylvania disaster and Henry Clemens' death—but more prove disappointing after the white heat of the book's inception. The two chapters on the history of the river are merely an afterthought; the later ones too often wander among irrelevant yarns, like the revenge of the Austrian, or vignettes of picturesque New Orleans. Sam Clemens' and a half as cub pilot are followed by almost no mention of his two years as a licensed skipper. Instead we are treated to such vagaries as Twain's famous theory about Sir Walter Scott, whose „Middle-Age sham civilization» he claimed, inspired the chivalry of the Old South, which in turn provoked the Civil War.
Yet with all its flaws of disunity and untidiness, Life on the remains a masterpiece. Its communicable delight in experience, its of the human comedy and tragedy on the river (which Melville alone among great artists had tried to bring into focus in The Confidence Man in 1857) lend it real durability. Howeils believed that the author long regarded it his greatest book — pleased with assurance to that effect from the German Kaiser and also from a hotel porter, whose praise he accepted with equal satisfaction. In other moods, toward the end of his life, Twain favored Joan of Arc, in part because it cost him “twelve years of divparation and two years of writing. The others needed no divparation, & got none.» Thus again he displayed the blindness of self-appraisal. The book that required probably least effort of all, drawn from a brimming native reservoir, Huckleberry Finn, unquestionably is his finest, with Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi as runners-up.
7.2 Later years of Mark Twain
Mark Twain's later years show a drift toward the remote in time and place, in a fitful quest for new themes, new magic—a search that proceeded apace with a growing sense of personal dissatisfaction, frustration, and heartbreak. While the aging artist began to lose much of his creative fire, Clemens the generous, erratic, moody, and vulnerable human being remained, standing at bay against the disillusions and disasters that gathered to ring him around and mock his fame as the world humorist of the century. The development of this last phase is worth tracing.
From recollections of his Hannibal boyhood he gravitated toward a new but distinctly artificial romanticism, «the pageant and fairy-tale» of lire 1° medieval Europe. His earliest treatment of the theme is, The Prince and the Pauper (i88i),history mainly for children, built upon the old plot to taffy. Here to a degree, and still more in Connecticut Yard in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of An (1896), the romantic's fascination with knights and castles is counterbalance by the iconoclast's itch to shatter that world of sham and injustice, w crown and miter lorded it over the commons. The savage indignation w Twain so loved to unleash found hunting that gratified him: the divy some resemblance to the contemporary, without committing him to the consequences of a frontal attack upon modern authoritarianism, convention, and orthodoxy. A Connecticut Yankee, best of the cycle, shows just such an ingenious mechanic as Clemens must often have met on visits to the Hartford shops of Pratt & Whitney, a Yankee who is swept back in time to Camelot. With one hand he transforms Arthurian England into a going concern of steam and electricity; with the other, seeks to plant the seeds of equalitarian-ism. He remarks that in feudal society six men out of a thousand cracks the whip over their fellows' backs: «It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.» This passage, as the late President Roosevelt testified, furnished the most memorable phrase in modern American government. The Connecticut Yankee asserts that the mass of a nation can always produce «the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.» Yet the medieval mob is shown collectively to be gullible, vicious, invincibly ignorant, like the populace of Hannibal or Hartford, so that the Yankee sets up not a true democracy but a benign dictatorship centering in himself and his mechanical skills—a kind of technocrat's Utopia. Dazzled by the wonders of applied science, Mark Twain always hoped for social as well as technological miracles from the dynamo.
Twain's apotheosis of the Virgin—in terms of Henry Adams' dilemma— of spiritual forces in conflict with materialism and the stupid cruelty of organized society, appears in Joan of Arc. The Maid was his favorite character in history. But as Twain's imagination is better thankless knowledge of medieval life, the result at best is a tour de force.
Joan anonymously, in hope of giving this book a head start the-world had come synonymous with comedy. Indeed, most people continued to hail with uproarious mirth Mark Twain's explosive attacks upon power politics, imperialism, malefactors of great wealth, hypocrisy in morals and religion, and other manifestations of what he increasingly came to call «the damned human race.» They refused to forget «The Celebrated Jumping Frog,» or his reputation for convulsing any crowd whenever his mouth was opened. Meanwhile, as the satirist gained upper hand over the humorist in his nature, and age diminished his ebullience, Mark Twain not only earnest vainly for a serious nearing also came role of platform zany.
Lecturing, however, became a need more urgent than ever. For, beginning with the Panic of 1893, the tide of Mark Twain's luck suddenly changed. The famous writer, with ample cash in hand and enviable royalties rolling in, still vigorous in health and self-confidence, the adoring husband and beloved anther of three charming daughters—this self-made «jour» printer and river-Dustman whom the world delighted to honor—upon him fortune suddenly began to rain The first losses were financial. The Paige typesetting machine, brain child of an erratic inventor who came close to anticipating the fabulous success of Merge talker’s linotype, failed after years of costly maintenance from Clemens1 pocket; instead of making millions, he lost hundreds of thousands. Then the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster (named for the son-in-law of Mark's sister, but backed by the author himself through suspicion of the big commercial publishers) crashed into bankruptcy. Twain's new friend Henry H. Rogers, Standard Oil magnate and by the lights of the muckraking age a robber baron, advised him that the ethics of literature were higher than those of business, and «you must earn the cent per cent.» Mark's own conscience fully acquiesced. Even though his old exuberant energy was flagging, he set out in 1895 on a world lecture tour, after giving a statement to the divss:
The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the cellular and its debts never outlaw.
The profits, together with royalties and the astute management of Mr. Rogers, eventually enabled him to pay the last dollar to these creditors and add an American parallel to the case of Sir Walter Scott.
Twain's last notable book about American life, Muttonhead Wilson (1894), written on the brink of financial disaster but before the onset of deeper tragedies, is about a nonconformist who is too witty and wise for the backwoods community where his days are spent; miscalled «Muttonhead,» he at last wins recognition by solving a murder mystery through his hobby of fingerprints. In so doing he also unravels a case of transposed identities for which the Regress Proxy—a character of magnificent vigor and realism—had been responsible. The novel is a daring, though inconclusive, study of miscegenation. Significant of Mark Twain's growing pessimism are the cynical chapter mottoes ascribed «Calendar,» such as: «If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.» Or, still more typical to the aging Twain; «Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life » [7]knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great * factor of our race. He brought death into the world.»
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--PAGE_BREAK--These notes—the ingratitude and folly of man, the vanity of wishes, the praise of death as the nepenthe for life's tragedy—echo increase kingly through the later writings of Mark Twain, This drift was no nature, but the accentuation of a lifelong trend. In youth he had been object to fits of melancholy and disillusion. In Cincinnati at the age of twenty he had listened avidly to a homespun philosopher expound the gospel of scientific determinism; as a cub pilot he read Tom Paine «with fear and hesitation.» Later, in San Francisco, Mark said he had come within a trigger's breadth of suicide, and in 1876 for obscure causes yielded to a bad season of the blues. Still later he discovered Jonathan Edwards, brooding for days over the «dominion of Motive and Necessity,» and was powerfully drawn to the agnosticism of Huxley, Haeckel, and Ingersoll. As a boy he had been terrorized by the fickle and vindictive Jehovah of Sunday schools; as a youth he graduated to the God of scientific law, impersonal but just; as an old man he returned to the cruel God, now stripped of anthropomorphic whims, but no less terrible as causation and fate. As early as 1882, in an unpublished dialogue between Negroes written on his river trip, Mark Twain sketched out the logic elaborated sixteen years later in his «wicked book» What Is Man?—not printed until 1906, then privately and anonymously because boastingly incontrovertible. Its argument, developed between an earnest Young Man and a cynical Old Man, is that self-interest and self-approval are the mainsprings of human conduct, however cleverly they mask themselves as honor, charity, altruism, or love. Hunger for self-esteem is the master passion; under this demon of the ego, free will is nothing but illusion.
While Mark was lecturing around the world for «honor,» news reached him that back home his favorite daughter Suzy had suddenly succumbed to meningitis. Would the girl have died if her parents had not deserted her? It was perhaps a foolish question, but natural to a self-accusing heart like Clemens'. Unpublished papers bear witness to his bitterness in those days, savage reflections about how God gives us breath and bodies only to undermine us with the million plagues of disease and heartbreak, to show what Twain calls His «fatherly infatuation» toward us. Meanwhile Mrs. Clemens sank deeper and deeper into a hopeless invalidism that ended only with the mercy of her death in 1904; and their daughter Jean, whose moods had long puzzled them, was discovered to be an incurable epileptic. Mark Twain's own robust health was beginning to crumble, and—as a still more tragic circumstance to the artist who had begun to use hard work as an anodyne for griffins magnificent creative powers were now sadly on the wane. His unpublished papers are full of fragmentary stories and novels that simply would not come out right, and were endlessly reworked, rewritten, finally abandoned. Many e reminiscent, in plot and character, of his golden period; the magician fell upon his old repertory, made the same passes, but somehow failed to with personal revelation. Twain in pet tormenting himself, in a dozen allegorical disguises, with the began to rain blow. The first losses were financial. The Paige typesetting machine, brain child of an «erratic» inventor «who came close to anticipating the fabulous success of linotype, failed after years of costly maintenance from Clemens' pocket; instead of making millions, he lost hundreds of thousands. Then the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster (named for the son-in-law of Mark's sister, but backed by the author himself through suspicion of the big commercial publishers) crashed into bankruptcy. Twain's new friend Henry H. Rogers, Standard Oil magnate and by the lights of the muckraking age a robber baron, advised him that the ethics of literature were higher than those of business, and „you must earn the cent per cent.“ Mark's own conscience fully acquiesced. Even though his old exuberant energy was flagging, he set out in 1895 on a world lecture tour, after giving a statement to the divss:
The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never outlaw.
The profits, together with royalties and the astute management of Mr. Rogers, eventually enabled him to pay the last dollar to these creditors and add an American parallel to the case of Sir Walter Scott.
Twain's last notable book about American life, Wilson (1894), written on the brink of financial disaster but before the onset of deeper tragedies, is about a nonconformist who is too witty and wise for the backwoods community where his days are spent; miscalled he at last wins recognition by solving a murder mystery through his hobby of fingerprints. In so doing he also unravels a case of transposed identities for which the Negress Roxy—a character of magnificent vigor and realism—had been responsible. The novel is a daring, though inconclusive, study of miscegenation. Significant of Mark Twain's growing pessimism are the cynical chapter mottoes ascribed to „Calendar,“ such as: „If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.“ Or, still more typical pi the aging Twain: „Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great be*16' factor of our race. He brought death into the world.“
These notes—the ingratitude and folly of man, the vanity of hum wishes, the praise of death as the nepenthe for life's tragedy—echo increasingly through the later writings of Mark Twain. This drift was no A nurture, but the accentuation of a lifelong trend. In youth he had been object to fits of melancholy and disillusion. In Cincinnati at the age of twenty listened avidly to a homespun philosopher expound the gospel of determinism; as a cub pilot he read Tom Paine „with fear and hesitation.“ in San Francisco, Mark said he had come within a trigger's breadth of suicide, and in 1876 for obscure causes yielded to a bad season of the blues. Still later he discovered Jonathan Edwards, brooding for days over the „dominion of Motive and Necessity,“ and was powerfully drawn to the agnosticism of Huxley, Hackle, and Innersole. As a boy he had been terrorized by the fickle and vindictive Jehovah of Sunday schools; as a youth he graduated to the God of scientific law, impersonal but just; as an old man he returned to the cruel God, now stripped of anthropomorphic whims, but no less terrible as causation and fate. As early as 1882, in an unpublished dialogue between Negroes written on his river trip, Mark Twain sketched out the logic elaborated sixteen years later in his „wicked book“ What Is Man? — not printed until 1906, then privately and anonymously because boastingly incontrovertible. Its argument, developed between an earnest Young Man and a cynical Old Man, is that self-interest and self-approval are the mainsprings of human conduct, however cleverly they mask themselves as honor, charity, altruism, or love. Hunger for self-esteem is the master passion; under this demon of the ego, free will is nothing but illusion.
While Mark was lecturing around the world for „honor,“ news reached him that back home his favorite daughter Suzy had suddenly succumbed to meningitis. Would the girl have died if her parents had not deserted her? It was perhaps a foolish question, but natural to a self-accusing heart like Clemens'. Unpublished papers bear witness to his bitterness in those days, savage reflections about how God gives us breath and bodies only to undermine us with the million plagues of disease and heartbreak, to show what Twain calls His „fatherly infatuation“ toward us. Meanwhile Mrs. Clemens sank deeper and deeper into a hopeless invalidism that ended only with the mercy of her death in 1904[8]; and their daughter Jean, whose moods had long puzzled them, was discovered to be an incurable epileptic. Mark Twain's own robust health was beginning to crumble, and — as a still more tragic circumstance to the artist who had begun to use hard work as an anodyne for grief — is magnificent creative powers were now sadly on the wane. His unpublished papers are full of fragmentary stories and novels that simply would not come, and were endlessly reworked, rewritten, finally abandoned. Many re reminiscent, in plot and character, of his golden period; the magician fell upon his old repertory, made the same passes, but somehow failed to quant with personal revelation. Twain in kept tormenting him, in a dozen allegorical disguises, with the problem of „guilt“ which (as his Calvinist conscience whispered) must somehow be antecedent to punishment, the cause of all the failures and bereavements fate had inflicted upon him. The artist keeps asking himself: Was I to blame, for something I did or left undone? The motif of a doting father with a dead or missing child is frequent, and of course transparent.
One such story concerns the dream of a man who has fallen asleep after gazing at a drop of water, swimming with animalcule, beneath the microscope. He dreams that he is on shipboard in the Antarctic seas pursuing his lost child who has been carried off by another ship, in a chase that continues like some nightmare in a fever, while terrible creatures arise to roam the deep and snatch passengers off the deck. The captain of the ship is called the Superintendent of Dreams, and it is his cunning to destroy the seafarers' sense of reality, while they circle toward the ultimate horror of the Great White Glare —actually the beam cast through the microscope's field by the reflector—a vortex of death into which all things, including the craft with the missing child, are being drawn. Seldom has determinism found a grimmer symbol.
The greatest story of Mark Twain's later period, too often neglected in the appraisal to his work, wins at last the personal answer for which he sought so desperately. In the light of those unfinished manuscripts among the Mark Twain Papers, it attains true perspective. This is The Mysterious Stranger, begun in the gloom of 1898 after Susy's death and Jean's hopeless prognosis, but not finished until several years later and published post- Like the last act of a Greek tragedy, or Samson Agonistes with „all passion spent,“ it achieves a wintry serenity beyond despair. The story is that of _some boys who are really Tom Sawyer's gang in medieval dress, in the Austrian village of Eelworm, who strike up acquaintance with a supernatural visitor able to work miracles and juggle with lives. Calling himself „Satan,“ he claims relationship with the prince of fallen angels, but appears to live in a sphere beyond both good and evil. Laughter and tears, joy and torment, saintliness and sin, to him are but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and at last he grows bored with his own wonder-working caprices. He then tells the wide-eyed Theodora.
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
And in his heart of hearts the boy knows this is true. Here, in the closing pages of The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain solved his riddle of grief, and clothed his soul in the only invulnerable armor of desperation. Good and evil, like reality itself, are only illusions, such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with the best gift of the Artist who saves it to the last—extinction…
Like Hailey’s comet in 1835 and 1910, whose appearance Mark Twain saw as setting the beginning and the end of his life, the luster of his genius flashed forth now and again against this darkened sky of fatalism. He wrote and spoke with sparkles of his old wit, and few were aware of the encircling. Oxford gave him her degree of Doctor of Letters in 1907, and his birthdays became national events. In his famous white clothes he seemed a kind of ghost from America's buried life, recalling the nostalgia of her youth, revisiting these glimpses of the modern city and its vast industrialism. But his great creative genius had almost gone—that energy which he spent and squandered so freely, when he had it, with the recklessness of the Old West. For Mark Twain the artist had always been a kind of pocket miner, stumbling like fortune's darling upon native ore of incredible richness and exploiting it with effortless skill—but often gleefully mistaking fool's gold for the genuine article, or lavishing his strength upon historical diggings long since played out. If latterly he seemed to deny his role as America's great comic spirit, perhaps the key can be found in his last travel book: „Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.“
8.2 Simpletons abroad (American literature abroad)
England had welcomed the American writers of the classical period, and continued to read them for some time after they had begun to be neglected by the American public. In a middle-class English home about the year 1900, Emerson would stand on the shelves next to Carlyle, Longfellow next to Tennyson (with signs of being more frequently read) and Lowell next to Matthew Arnold. The new generation rejected them all, the Bostonians along with the native Victorians. To the younger English intellectuals of the time, the only transatlantic authors worth reading, except Whitman and Thoreau, were the new social realists, from Garland through Norris to Upton Sinclair. Dreiser's Sister Carrie was a critical success in London, when published there in 1901, although it had been arousing such a bitterly quiet condemnation in New York that the author—till then a successful journalist—found that his articles were „being rejected by all the magazines.
The English were usually hospitable to American writers as persons, often more hospitable than they were to imported books. During there was a large American literary colony in what was still called the mother country: it included the aging Bret Hart, Henry James, Harold Frederic, Pearl from Boston (who wrote under the name John Oliver Hobbes), Howard Sturgis (author of the fine but neglected Belchamber), Henry Harland (who founded and edited the Yellow Booty, and, for his last two years, Stephen Crane. Most of these authors had a more apdivciative public in England than in the United States; for example, Bret Hare’s new books continued to be read in their English editions long after most Americans had forgotten that he was still a living author. Stephen Crane, who could not complain of being neglected at home, could justly complain of being pursued there by scandals that the English found beneath their notice. Henry James, with no larger audience in London than in New York, at least found more of the happy few to understand his work. The same hospitality in later years would be shown to Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.»), and T. S. Eliot, the last of who became a British subject in 1927, like James in 1915[9].
At the turn of the century, some of the larger American magazines were printing English editions; that of Harper's was edited by Andrew Lang and had a British circulation of 100,000. Many American books crossed the Atlantic. In the October, 1904, issue of World's Work, Chalmers Roberts broadly asserted that ten American books were being published in England where one had been published twenty years before. He was not surprised by the fondness of the English public for the genteel writings of James Lane Alien, a phenomenon remarked upon by many critics. What amazed him was the English success of American rural novels like David Harum, Eben Holden, and Mrs. Wigs of the Cabbage Patch, all of which he described as being «intensely foreign and full of detail quite unintelligible to the average Briton.»
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--PAGE_BREAK--Shortly after 1910, however, the British public showed signs of losing interest in American fiction, except for commodities like the works of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs (who afterward claimed that the globe-girdling adventures of Tarzan had been translated into fifty-six languages). American magazines discontinued their London editions. As for the serious American novelists, English critics learned to say that they were ten or twenty or fifty years behind the times. A few critics, however, had begun to discover the new American poets—Robinson, Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay— sometimes before they were known in the United States; for example, Robert Frost had his first two books published in London.
There were new American novelists, too, but they had few English readers during the First World War; one of its effects was to keep the two countries apart intellectually, even after they became allies. In 1920 the English publisher of Main Street was so little imdivssed by Sinclair Lewis' American success that he began by merely importing a few hundred sets of printer's sheets; it was not until later that he had the novel printed in England. Main Street was never popular there, although it was more generally liked in Australia, which, more than New Zealand makes its own choice of American books. Babbitt, however, was the English best seller of 1922; and when its author next visited London he was received like the general of an Allied army. «England,» Lewis told his hosts, with his redheaded gift for speaking his mind, «can no longer be the mother country to American literature, any more than she can be the mother country to American politics or American life.» The English listened, protested, argued with one another, and came to believe that Lewis was right.
Babbitt was the beginning of a new era, during which American books were not only read but imitated. On their different literary levels, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Damon Runyon, and Dash ell Ham-met each had English disciples, who sometimes improved on their various models. Graham Greene, for example, wrote English gangster novels that had a psychological depth lacking in his American divcursors, except Hemingway. A younger Englishman, Peter Cheney, stuck to his models closely, so much so that one of his stories was included (1945) in a French anthology of the new American writing. The editor had learned of Cheney’s nationality before the volume went to divss, but had kept him with the others because of his American style. By this time, however, styles and influences were flying back and forth across the Atlantic; and the English imitators of the American hard-boiled novelists—Graham Greene especially—were finding American imitators in their turn. Among poets the transatlantic relations were even closer. T. S. Eliot was the strongest early influence on the new English poets of the thirties such as Auden (before he came to live in the States), Spender, and Manlike; while Auden in turn set the tone for American poets in the forties.
The American vogue continued year after year. In 1938 an English publisher reported that all the novels since Babbitt with a sale of more than 100,000 copies in England had been of American origin. American magazines were also read: especially Time (which had two English imitations), the Readers Digest (with an English edition), and the New Yorker, which, in the brighter circles, was quoted more often than Punch. In 1942 one-quarter of the new trade books listed in English publishers' catalogues had been written in the States. By 1946, however, the percentage of transatlantic imports was beginning to decline.
In France it was still growing. Not only were the French translating or planning to translate dozens of the more prominent American novelists and the plays of Eugene O'Neill; they were also discovering and publishing, in the midst of a paper shortage, American books that had been largely neglected at home; for example, the fantastic Miss Lonely hearts, by Nathanael West, which had been published here in 1933 and had promptly gone out of print. At the same time they showed a renewed interest in the American classics. The first French translation of Moby appeared during the German occupation, together with a somewhat fictionalized biography of Melville by Jean Giono; and a translation of The Scarlet Letter was published in 1946.
The French had read most of the American classical authors when they first appeared, but had forgotten them sooner than the English. There were a few striking exceptions: notably Cooper and Poe, who were carried over bodily into French literature and remain an integral part of it. Among the Americans writing at the turn of the century, Henry James had a few careful French readers, and exercised a still undetermined influence on Marcel Proust. Jack London had a wider public; he inherited the French popularity of Bret Harte. .Edith Wharton, who lived in France, had most of her books translated; they were praised in the terms that are usually applied to estimable but unexciting French novels. Most of the other living American writers were little known even in Paris; and their country was regarded, in general, as the literary home of cowboys, miners, trappers, and the inimitable Nick Carter, whose weekly adventures were then appearing in France, as in fifteen other foreign countries.
The First World War, which tended to separate us intellectually from the English, thus marking the end of what might be called the second colonial period in American letters, was an occasion for renewing old literary ties with the French. Much has been written about the flight of American writers to Paris during the twenties; it is not so generally known that there was a smaller but influential movement of French writers and scholars in the opposite direction. The migration began under French government auspices, with professors from the Sorbonne encouraged to make American tours and lecture at American universities. They were shortly followed by a selected group of French postgraduate students, some of whom carried home with them a wide knowledge of American authors. Chairs of American Civilization and Literature were founded at several of the French universities: at Paris (where Charles Cestre was the incumbent), Grenoble, Lille, Aix-Marseille, and elsewhere. French students working in the field produced what is probably the largest group of scholarly studies of American literature that exists in any foreign language.
But interest in American culture was also growing in a quite different circle, that of the younger avant-garde writers. Finding not much hope in Europe after the war, they were looking for new material, new ideas, and new ways of life. A sort of romantic Americanism became the vogue among them after 1920: they were connoisseurs of American films, especially Westerns, they read the advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, they dreamed of living in a New York skyscraper (though few of them, in life, got beyond making a single brief voyage), and they even dressed in what they thought was the American fashion, wearing belts instead of suspenders and shaving their upper lips; whereas the young Americans who were running off to France in those years were connoisseurs of French books and French wines and liked to wear little French mustaches. These were superficial signs on both sides, but they were an indication of tastes that proved to be lasting. The young American writers were deeply influenced by French literature in the Symbolist tradition; the young French writers were looking for American books that would exdivss the picturesque qualities they found in American life; and when the books began to appear in translation, after 1930, they seized upon them enthusiastically.
The Index Translationum, published for eight years by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, lists the titles and authors of all the books translated into the major European languages between 1932 and 1940. During that period there were 332 French translations of American books in the field of general literature. Jack London stands at the head of the list with twenty-seven titles, and James Oliver Cur wood follows with twenty; both these adventure-story writers were old favorites with the French public, although their day was passing. Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Allan Foe have fourteen titles each; Ellery Queen has ten detective stories; Pearl Buck has nine of her books; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis Bromfield, and Henry James all have seven. Farther down the list are the new authors that the younger generation was reading: William Faulkner with five titles, Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett with four, John Dos Passes and Erskine Caldwell with three. None of these last reached the broadest French public, but all of them had what Lewis and Bromfield and Pearl Buck failed to achieve, that is, a direct influence on the style and content of the new French writing.
Faulkner, comparatively little known at home, had gained an amazingly deep and lasting French reputation. Andre Gide called him «one of the most important, perhaps the most important, of the stars in this new constellation»; and Jean-Paul Sartre was more extreme in his praise: «For young writers in France,» he said in 1945, «Faulkner is a god.» Many French critics were disturbed by what seemed to them the completely foreign quality of the new American novelists. The newspaper man in Gide's Imaginary Interviews says:
I grant you Hemingway, since he is the most European of them all. As for the others, I have to confess that their strangeness appalls me. I thought I would go mad with pain and horror when I read Faulkner's Sanctuary and his Light in August. Dos Passos makes me suffocate. I laugh, it is true, when reading Caldwell's Journeyman or God's Little Acre, but I laugh on the wrong side of my mouth… If one believes what they are saying, the American cities and country sides must offer a foretaste of hell.
But if one believes what Flaubert said a hundred years ago French cities also must have been an abode of the damned. All these American novelists, except possibly Caldwell, were students of Flaubert; they had been applying methods learned from him to American materials. Now their books were being studied in turn by Flaubert's countrymen.
Most of the other European countries followed either the French or the British pattern in their choice of American books. A novel that was a best seller in England, like Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, would also be a best seller in Germany and Scandinavia. An author admired by the French for his intensity or his technical discoveries would also be admired by other Latin nations. Almost everywhere there was a lack of interest in American literature during the years after 1000 and a birth or rebirth of interest at some moment after 1920. This new interest appeared earlier in the northern countries, because they liked Dreiser and Lewis, and later in the Latin countries, which showed more interest in younger writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. There were, however, national variations in the two general patterns; and in Russia after the Revolution the variations were so wide as to form a new pattern of their own.
Germany between 1890 and 1945 was another special case that has to be considered in some detail. In the Kaiser's Germany, Mark Twain had been by far the most popular American author; there were exactly 100 translations of his various works between 1890 and 1913. After him came Anna Katharine Green, the early detective-story writer, with eighty-one translations; then Bret Harte, Frances Hodgson Burnett, F. Marion Crawford, and Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur. More than half the novels of American origin translated into German during the twenty-four years before the First World War were the work of these six writers. The most admired American poet was Walt Whitman, although his greatest popularity would come later, during the early years of the Weimar Republic. Emerson was the favorite American essayist.
After the war, the Germans were eager for books that dealt with American industry, the power by which they felt they had been defeated and especially eager for anything that dealt with Henry Ford. What they looked for in American books was information first of all, but they were better pleased if the information was divsented critically; therefore they joked Theodore Dreiser (who was for several years the most popular American libraries), Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and, in general, all the critical realists. Hemingway was admired by the younger German writers who would later go into exile, but most of them were puzzled by his habit of understatement. When a German novelist wants to convey sadness or mild regret, he is likely to say that he was overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief. When Hemingway wants to imply that his hero was overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief, as at the end of A Farewell to Arms, he says that he «walked back to the hotel in the rain»; and the Germans did not know what to make of it. Thomas Wolfe, who never used a little word when he could find three big ones, was an author more to their taste. Loofy Homeward, Angel appealed to young people of all political faiths, before and after Hitler's coming to power. There were good as well as sinister qualities in the German youth movement, and some of the better ones were mirrored at a distance in Wolfe's hero.
The strength of the Socialist and Communist parties under the Weimar Republic helped to create a public for American authors with radical sym patties: not only for Upton Sinclair and Jack_Lqndon, but also for John Dos Passos, whose books at one time had a larger circulation in Germany than in the United States. Another writer admired by the German radicals was Agnes Smedley, whose autobiography, Daughter of Earth, is comparatively little known in her own country, although it has been translated into fourteen languages. In Germany, where it was called Eine Frau Allein, it was especially popular among women seeking courage to lead independent lives.
Miss Smedley's various books on the Chinese Revolution were also widely read until 1933, when they were all withdrawn from circulation. It was the same with Dreiser Sinclair, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, none of whose works appeared in Germany between 10,33 and 1946; they were the best known of the many American authors who suffered from Hitler's burning continued to be published in spite of his having written the anti-Nazi It Can't Happen Here. The Index Translationum shows that five of his novels were translated into German between 1932 and 1940. There were eight translations of Pearl Buck during the same period, more than of any other serious American author; perhaps her work was thought to be politically harmless because it dealt with China and, unlike Agnes Smedley's, made no plea for the Chinese Communists. Very few American books were published in Hitler's Germany if they dealt with contemporary Europe or America in any thoughtful fashion, no matter whether their authors were radical or conservative. The German public was still curious about our literature, but was offered, in general, only romance, adventure, mystery, and sentiment.
The Index Translationum lists 297 German translations from American originals in the field of general literature, a figure not far from the French total of 332. There is, however, a difference in quality. Nearly half the German list consists of Westerns and detective stories, with Max Brand, a mass purveyor of cowboy fiction, standing at the head of it with twenty-six titles. Historical romances were popular as an escape from daily life under a dictatorship: Anthony Adverse, 'Northwest Passage, and especially Gone with the Wind, which by 1941 had achieved the huge German sale of 360,693 copies; then it, disappeared from the bookstores with the demand for it still unsatisfied. Grapes of Wrath was circulated with official approval after Pearl Harbor, divsumably on the ground that its picture of the Okies would serve as anti-American propaganda. Instead, what it proved to most of its readers was that American peasants at their most destitute could travel about the country in automobiles, and that American writers were free to speak their minds in epical novels, at a time when German literature was being stifled. American books were read hungrily after the war ended, although few were available. Daughter of Earth was republished and even serialized in a Berlin newspaper; Thorn ton Welder’s The Sin of Our Teeth was the hit of the German theaters.
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