Literary Views And Reviews THE TWAIN WHO WERE MARK TWAIN

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31362, 6 May 1967, Page 4

Literary Views And Reviews THE TWAIN WHO WERE MARK TWAIN

[Reviewed by It. T. 3.1 Mr Clemens and Mark Twain. By Justin Kaplan. Jonathan Cape. 1967. Mark Twain suffered all his life from the public regarding him as a “mere humorist,” a funhy man who was not to be taken seriously. From the time of his first great success in writing “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” Samuel Clemens was greeted everywhere as a man who could always be expected to produce a joke. The children would confront him directly with “Say something

funny, Mr Clemens,” and adults seemed to expect him to entertain whether he felt Inclined or not.

With the exception of certain kinds of wit, most humour is at someone’s expense, and psychoanalyists claim that all humour has some element of hostility—witness the point of most of the "L.8.J.” jokes today. Twain wrote “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.” Typical of Twain is this heading from "Puddi’nhead Wilson”: “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.”

No doubt Sam Clemens gloried in his ability to hold a lecture audience breathless as they waited for the “snapper” at the end of his story, and it is worth noting that much of his humour is turned inward upon himself. Yet again and again he complained of not being taken seriously, as this biography makes evident. Melville suffered from a similar problem in that he was early labelled “that writer of South Sea romances” rather than as the author of the strangest literary voyage of all time, “Moby Dick.” Many books have been written about Samuel Clemens as a writer, as a product of the frontier, as an author who was thwarted by the prudery of a Victorian era; Justin Kaplan has made use of this material as well as the various manuscript collections which are still unpublished to write a very well-balanced account of Twain’s life.

Kaplan begins the story when Twain was thirty-one in the belief that what Clemens had himself written about his early years is incomparably the best possible account even if it is not always the truest Here we confront part of the reason for the title, “Mr

Clemens and Mark Twain." As many critics have shown, there were always the two individuals inhabiting one pair of pants, twins that sometimes did very contradictory things. It is interesting that so many of his stories involve sets of twins. There is the Mark Twain who all his life thought with a dreamy nostalgia of the boy living on the shores of the Mississippi river a life of freedom from civilised restraints or telling magnificent tall tales about the west or steamboating. There is also the Samuel Clemens who, partly because he was a “westerner,” wanted desperately to be accepted by the literary and social circles of the East and wanted also to be financially successful and live elegantly. This duel personality led on the one hand to his writing scathingly of the corruption inherent in the American worship of material prosperity while at the same time delighting in earning and spending one hundred thousand dollars in a single year. Another evidence of this same duality was Twain’s ability to write vigorous, direct prose which he then asked his wife, William Dean Howells and his close friend, Rev. Joseph Twichell, to “censure” in the interests of making the books more genteel. He might argue feebly that “stench” was a perfectly good English word when the facts called for its use, but he allowed his wife Livy to modify it to “smell.” Kaplan

believes that too much blame has been placed on Twain’s wife on this question of censoring his writing, stating that “The Gilded Age,” the first full scale product of Mark Twain’s Hartford years, is not hushed and polite literature nor does it deal with any of the smiling aspects of American life. This book was written in collaboration with a neighbour, Charles Dudley Warner.

Difiicult for most of us to understand today is why a book like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” should, in 1884, cause the Concord Library to remove it from its shelves as “rough, coarse, and inelegant” Louisa May Alcott wrote, “If Mr Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had better stop writing for them.” Still, in the 1960 s the book was removed from some Philadelphia High Schools during a gigantic campaign against “obscenity” and a “cleaned up” version is said to have been substituted. Twain rightly saw that the book’s banning in Concord, Mass., “will sell 25,000 copies, sure.” Samuel Clemens was none too scrupulous in the methods he used to ensure the success of some of his books. He was not above writing to the editor of the “New York World” asking that the newspaper help the book along by a sympathetic review. Twain continually suffered from a sense that he was living in a hostile world where the public and the

press were always ready to turn against him. He became bitterly jealous of Bret Harte who had helped him secure recognition in the East. Even after Harte was sliding rapidly downhill, Twain tried to prevent President Hayes from appointing Harte to a sinecure as a consular agent in Germany. Kaplan suggests that Clemens saw in Harte’s decline an “infuriating parallel" with what he feared might be bis own fate. Another side of Twain is his immense rage at man’s inhumanity to man. As part of his personal reparation to the race, he supported a Negro student through Yale University. He defended the slaves in the Belgian Congo and various minority groups in America. At the same time he seems to have felt a growing sense of despair about man's fate and man’s nobility. The black despondency of his later years when he wrote “The Mysterious Stranger” was aggravated by the personal disasters within his own family and the neverending sense of guilt which he took upon himself for the tragedies that happened. .

Another side of Twain which is perhaps equally little known to most readers is the ease with which he was constantly persuaded to invest money and time in what usually proved to be unsuccessful inventions. The best known of these was the Paige Typesetting Machine in which Clemens sunk more than a hundred thousand dollars and countless hopes of becoming a millionaire. It contributed finally to his bankruptcy so that Twain, nearing sixty, was deeply in debt. He returned to the lecture circuit on a world tour and paid off all of the creditors; he was able to do this, however, only with the advice and help of Henry Rogers, one of the architects of the Standard Oil trust, the common stereotype of the ruthless capitalist. On the world tour, Twain visited New Zealand and this joke is supposed to have originated here. Clemens was riding on a very slow train, one that seemed unusually deliberate and creeping even for New Zealand. When the guard finally came round, Mark Twain promptly handed him half a ticket the kind usually reserved for juvenile passengers. The conductor looked hard at the whitehaired humorist is no little surprise and demanded somewhat sarcastically; “And are you a child?”

“No, not any more,” replied Mark blandly, “but I was when I got on your train.” “Mr Clemens and Mark Twain” is not only a biography but in addition gives an excellent sense of participation in many aspects of 19th century life. The range of material relating to Twain includes his sometimes contradictory views on democracy, his changing attitudes to the English, his dislike of the French, his attempts to write for the stage, the Lyceum movement, his veneration of women, and his frequent involvement in litigation. With all the contradictions, all the evidence of ambivalence, we must not forget the sheer delight in joining Huck Finn and Jim on the raft voyage down a great river, nor that Emerson wrote “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen and philosophers and divines.”