MARK TWAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 132, 30 November 1935, Page 14

MARK TWAIN

A FIGHTING AUTHOR

HUMORIST AND MAW OF ACTION

CENTENARY TODAI

(By '.'Solon.") | The psychologist who maintains that all authorship is autobiographical will find rich material in the books of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or as we know him "Mark Twain," the centenary o£ whose birth is today. For there is scarcely one of Mark Twain's published works which does not restate some phase of his experience. His boyhood was spent round the Mississippi, to which he returned ae^in in later life, drawn back by his enduring ambition to become a river pnoi, v.., family was left all but as destitute as Huckleberry Finn, and so we had the books which are the delight of boys of all ages—"Tom Sawyer" and the chronicle of Huck Finn's drifting down the broad and noble stream. Mark Twain went from the Mississippi to Carson City where he toiled as a miner to take the living which toe decline in the river trade denied him, and so obtained the background lor "Roughing It." The exuberance and fantastic atmosphere of early San Francisco inspired him to write 'the "Celebrated Jumping Frog1' which, made him famous almost overnight, .and his journey on the steamship Quaker City, undertaken on a commission from the newspaper "Alta California," resulted in "The Innocents Abroad." MANX-SIDED. It is impossible to summarise the : career of this man who blended fluency, keen intelligence, a native humour salty and fresh, with a lively interest in current affairs and a hatred of injustice and wrote, fought, and lived hard all through his seventy-five years. After his early struggles and flights in journalism he was definitely settled down to the trade of authorship by the time he was thirty-seven years old and living in that house at Hartford which was to be his home for the next thirty years. But as he wrote he found time for many things. He "edited, reported, invented," as one of his admirers has said. He toured and lectured, and lost great sums in speculative . investments, . becoming partner in a publishing house which failed and left, him with heavy debts. He took part' in the great fight to rid New -York of the corrupt rule of Tammany under "Boss" Croker, he met his owings, kept turning out book after book, kept darting here and there in his own country and abroad, and all the time was never without some injustice to counter, some good cause to-advance. No picture is com: plete .which results in his being described as "a celebrated humorist." Ha was all things at once: politician, financier, publisher, author,, , philosopher, and figure of fun. His prodigious energy and. his range of activity in-: evitably recall another figure, the sage of. Ferney, also busied with many affairs and pouring out great floods of words. But in ' other' respects Mark Twain and Voltaire are far apart; William James would have called them "tender-minded" and 'Houghminded." The-Frenchman was . the. philosopher-realist, ths American the adventurer-mystic. NOT IMPRESSED. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad"--Mark-Twain-had signed his declaration of artistic independence. He was frankly unimpressed by the marvels-of painting and sculpture which he was invited to; admire. He would have sympathised with King,

Edward VII, who as Prince of Wales was dispatched to Rome to keep an archaeological diary and was more interested in the fact that one of his aides discovered the tomb of an uncle. The past was past, the present was 100 vital and important for any dead* weight of European heritage to be allowed to stifle it, or so he thought. Even in his own field he was never to attain full appreciation of the classic crcatow. He had never received any formal education worth the name ano had not been awed by the groat, figures of history. Consequently lie brought his resolute common sense to bear upon the heroes of the Western World and found many of them compounded of windy eloquence and sham.

That phase of his wort: was. perhaps, what attracted attention abroad. He was, in Ihe language of the period,

"an original.'1 His semi-barbaric dissent in the face of the cultural heritage of the Europeans was what was expected of the new America, his bewilderingly vivid diction and odd imagery merely accentuated it. His humour was the crude humour of the people, there were no overtones of wit and fancy. But whatever the reason he became, abroad as. at home, a figure of gigantic stature, only slightly less in bulk to Americans than their President, and to Kipling "the great

god-Hke Clemens." His mane of hair,. his incessant witticisms, his baying ■. voice,, and militant spirit combined to i make hm what he became, a national | institution. And as he toured about • and was acclaimed and dined with the Kaiser and consorted with the literary: great the .money flowed into his hands j —and flowed' out again. It is doubt-1 £ul if he ever learned the lesson of j prudence in money affairs, though he emerged from debt by sheer hard. work. . "BOOKS FOR BOYS." . Today he is in grave danger of be-, ing dismissed as a writer for boys. Even the Americans, who have re-vered-hinr so long, have taken--to con-; sidering him as an escape from everyday cares into memories of boyhood.. of;the "little red schoplhouse" and, barefoot freedom before the oil a~ge came. That a man was compounded

of the crusading elements of Mark Twain (he took his name from a call of the Mississippi pilots) should now be listed as a juvenile entertainer is ironic. For Mark Twain holds something fc-r everyone. There is originality and drama and humour in his book "A. Tramp Abroad" and the history of s he miners who "came in fortynine" i;- in "Roughing It." The tales of Hue I: Finn and Tom Sawyer portray the life of the people along the Mother of the Rivers in a manner which is invaluable to the social historian. Consider Huck Finn's qualms when he learns that Tom Sawyer is not above helping a negro slave to escape, oj: the family feud on the river, or the picture of strollii g entertainers given i:i "Huckleberry Finn." The "Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" was an ingenious idea which not only resulted in an entertaining book but gave the lead to scores oi: other writers, so many that it no longer appears as original as it was. "Life on. the Mississippi" is, quite simply, a classical, book and deserves to be far better :i:no\vn today. And. in addition to thes': he wrote of countless other things, [if General Grant's life, of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare plays, of Christian Science and Joan of Arc, and the nature of man. Even yet new books cife being disinterred; only this

year thiire has been discovered a fresh version of the famous "Slovenly Peter" which I:e.translated from the German as a warning to American children; at prestnt in the Press is a series of letters which he wrote from the Pacific Islands whither he went as correspondent of ii Californian paper. So it appears tls at even today it is improbable that wi: possess, all Mark Twain's important works. And with his centenary he): c to remind us we should remember that he-is>an author of many sides, a. *gian( near'our own time.