Free Press £25 pp722
Mark Twain’s achievement, his admirers proclaim, was to give voice to the American soul. He created a brand new American literary language, raw, honest, democratic, that freed God’s great nation from the stranglehold of East Coast intellectuals, who had enthralled their country to the effete, elitist culture of old Europe. Old Europeans may doubt this story line, and they will find plenty of grounds to contest it in Ron Powers’s enormous biography. For though Powers endorses the anti-European case, the facts, as he presents them, indicate conclusively that everything worthwhile in Twain’s thought stemmed from old Europe, specifically from the 18th-century European enlightenment, while everything that now seems base and backward was home-grown American.
This is particularly evident in relation to race and slavery. Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) was born into a slave-owning Missouri family and attended, as a boy, a solidly pro-slavery Presbyterian church. A sickly, irascible, sadistic child, given to slipping bats and snakes into his mother’s sewing basket, he seems to have had no doubts, as a young man, about the superiority of the white race or the morality of slave-owning. On his first visit to the east he wrote home railing against “infernal abolitionists”, and joked that he had better black his face, “for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people”. He never outgrew his love for the “Jim Crow” minstrel show, originating in the 1830s, in which blacked-up white actors did a comic imitation of black voices. As Powers observes, traces of this stage-darky language survive in Huckleberry Finn, which is one reason why the book was condemned as racist by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the time of the civil rights movement, and is still banned in some American states.
Young Twain’s other social views were of a piece with his attitude to Negroes. He never concealed or retracted his intense loathing of Native Americans, and his take on women was patronising and dictatorial. The idea that they should have the vote he dismissed as ridiculous. He cultivated a masculine persona, rough, tough, and daredevil, which was strikingly at odds with his actual conduct. When the civil war broke out he joined a Missouri militia as a lieutenant, but fled, with his whole detachment, at the mere suspicion that there were enemy troops in the vicinity (there were not), and he did not stop running until he reached Nevada, where he sat out the war.
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The book in which he mounted his attack on old Europe was The Innocents Abroad, an account of a cruise through the Mediterranean to the Holy Land in 1867 with 65 cultured American tourists, whose supine admiration for European artworks attracted almost as much of his bile as the artworks themselves. He contrived, successfully, to ruin the trip for them by drinking, smoking and carousing with a band of cronies, and his disrespect for the locals was equally marked. When the ship reached Piraeus they were informed by the Greek authorities that they were in quarantine and could not land as there had been a cholera outbreak. Twain and his friends waited until dark, then got ashore and hiked across country, trampling through vineyards and stealing grapes on the way, until they reached the Acropolis, where they bribed the guard to let them in. Powers seems to see no special significance in this incident, but it could be read, in its small way, as an omen of modern America’s attitude to the sovereignty and property of other nation states.
What changed and redeemed Twain was exposure to precisely that Europeanised East Coast intelligentsia that Powers would have us believe he saved America from. It came about through his marriage to Livy Langdon. Her parents were wealthy, socially progressive and passionate abolitionists, linked to the “underground railroad” that smuggled runaway slaves to safety in the north. Their pastor was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Twain’ s aspiration to enter this fortress of upper-class eastern enlightenment astonished the Langdons’ friends, and Twain’s. When Livy’s father asked his prospective son-in-law for references, he supplied several names, but they all wrote back warning that Twain was a drunken reprobate and quite unfit for marriage into a decent family. Fortunately, Langdon was liberal enough to trust his daughter’s judgment, and she set about eradicating her new husband’s coarser traits, or, as Twainites would have it, destroying his raw western genius. They filled their Hartford mansion with European artefacts and furnishings, including the great Venetian bed that Twain used as a work station. He denounced slavery and racism and championed votes for women. Towards the end of his life, the former invader of the Acropolis saw where history was heading and came out passionately against American imperialism in the Philippines.
He owed not only ideas but also style to Europe. Irony was a European invention. It speaks for a tired disillusionment that only an old culture can feel. Americans still tend to find it annoying. But it was Twain’s greatest comic gift — which is saying a lot, for no funnier man ever lived. He knew that irony is a mask for rage and disappointment, pointing out to Livy that there is a “turbid sea of matchless hate” beneath the ironic surface of Jonathan Swift’s prose — and it was the same with his own. Like many cynics he was an idealist at heart. Although happily married, he cherished a lifelong platonic passion for a 14-year-old girl he had met in his days as a Mississippi steamboat pilot. He was furious with the world for being so stupid, and with God for not existing. But his Swiftian anger comes out as a joke: “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” So does his despair about the future peace of the world. Asked for his views on the Russian tsar’s proposals for world disarmament, he replied: “The tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others, it should not be much of a task now.”
Humour of this stamp tempts imitation, and Powers has unfortunately succumbed to the temptation. He packs his pages with quips and wisecracks, but the effect of his dogged waggery is far from enlivening, and nothing whatsoever like Twain. Powers is also prone to heroic fanfares, celebrating “the great arc” of Twain’s “punishing fame and majestic sorrows”, which would have earned his biographee’s curt ridicule. But these are venial faults. To set against them is a formidable grasp of the vast, tangled jungle of Twain scholarship, a second- to-none knowledge of the provincial newspapers and Wild West mining towns and mushrooming seaboard cities that were Twain’s habitat, and a prodigious fund of anecdote. The result is required reading not just for Twain addicts but for anyone who would like to know how modern America happened.
MORALITY TALE
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It wasn’t just the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that objected to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the book provoked anger at its first publication in 1885. Praise in some quarters was countered by anger in others — The Boston Advertiser railed at its “coarseness and bad taste” — and Concord Public Library even banned the book because of its language and questionable morals.
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websites:
www.literaturepage.com/authors/Mark-Twain.html
Online editions of his main works