Mark Twain knew the value of bad publicity. In 1885, when the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, banned Huckleberry Finn, he wrote to his publisher: “They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash suitable only for the slums’. That will sell 25,000 copies for us for sure.”
It did, and more. To this day some American libraries censor “the American Homer”, as Arthur Miller calls him, and thus ensure mass sales of his works. The custodians of America’s cultural virtue have always objected to Twain’s idiom. Then the forbidden word was “ain’t”. Now it’s “nigger”.
Twain’s language, his use of the American vernacular, is what makes him a great writer. He was the first to show his countrymen that the vulgar coinage of American speech carried as much beauty, elegance and meaning as any of the English models used by his predecessors. He used the rough yet musical language of a border area – between settled east and wild west, between free north and slave south – to tell the story of a population as much on the make as on the march.
He fashioned his tales from the conflicts arising from the enslavement of black people and afterwards the denial of their freedom in Emancipation. He held America’s conquests of other lands, particularly in the far-off Philippines, up to ridicule. After Twain, no writer could ignore the contradiction between the American ideal of liberty and its practice of subtler forms of slavery.
Toni Morrison, a novelist and descendent of enslaved “niggers” of the American south, defends Twain, his language, his humour and his morality. Her perceptive introduction to the new edition of Huckleberry Finn condemns those who prevent the young from reading Twain: “It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children.”
Morrison herself suffered “muffled rage” when she read the book in childhood. Absorbing more with each reading, into adolescence and adulthood, she came to see it as a masterpiece.
The Oxford Mark Twain is the uniform edition that Twain himself sought to produce in his old age, delayed for years by myriad and conflicting contracts with publishers. Twain oversaw publication of all his books, from typesetting to illustrations, and he devoted as much energy to marketing them as writing them. They are best read in the form he designed. With their period illustrations and typography, they delight the eye as well as the imagination.
The Oxford series has the inspired addition of introductions by great contemporary American writers including Morrison, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Kurt Vonnegut, Ward Just and E L Doctorow.
Few private readers can afford 29 volumes, but every lending library in the English-speaking world should stock them. It would allow their committees to remove volumes from time to time: conservatives censoring his denunciations of imperialism and racism in Following the Equator, political correctors putting Huck Finn under lock and key; Puritans burning The Diaries of Adam and Eve; and the anti-sex brigade suppressing essays and speeches such as “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”.
Twain’s most successful book in his lifetime was not Huckleberry Finn but The Innocents Abroad, a travel narrative about the first American package tour aboard the steamship Quaker City in 1867. The Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler writes: “I have no doubt that Innocents Abroad released today, would be banned in schools, the author condemned as a racist and possibly, just possibly, finding himself the subject of a fatwa.”
Twain wrote, for example, that his first landing, the Azores, was “eminently Portuguese – that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy and lazy.” He was less kind to Italians, Turks, Arabs and the peoples of the Balkans. Yet, Richler notes, Innocents Abroad was “the American coming-of-cultural-age book”, adding: “Twain, 31 years old at the time, set sail as just another freelance hack, and returned as the first true master of the American idiom.” Innocents sold 100,000 copies in three years; Roughing It, his next memoir, sold 60,000 in eight months. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn came later. Innocents was the making of Mark Twain and of American literature. It is also very, very funny.
“It is nothing to be proud of,” Mark Twain wrote of his humour, “but it is my strongest suit.” He said his humour was drawn from “the deep well of sorrow”. Andrew Hoffman’s Inventing Mark Twain shows how deep the well was. The sorrow began in childhood with his estrangement from and loss of his father and the deaths of his brother and sister, and continued with the deaths of his children and a lifelong terror of poverty, debt and embarrassment.
A funny man, he took himself seriously, as if burdened with what Dostoevsky called “excessive dignity”. Yet he seemed to love living. His daughter Clara, in her memoirs, recalled that her father required all the children to be at breakfast by eight each morning. “I would say that my father was the only one at the table who found any real joy in life so early in the morning, and of course he didn’t find it; he created it.”
Like Huck, Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and the slave Jim, Mark Twain was the creation of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens grew up on the Missouri frontier, the scene of his more enduring novels. He adopted several pen names including, at first, W Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. The name we know him by, Vidal observes, is “a river pilot’s measurement of depth, called out on approaching landfall – some 12 feet, a bit on the shallow side”.
After ten years as a printer’s apprentice, Clemens worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, a career he might have continued had the civil war not interrupted river traffic. Sam fled to Nevada to avoid service in either the Union or the Confederate armies. (He was in a Southern unit for a few weeks, until he deserted.) In Nevada’s mining towns, Clemens wrote for newspapers. Vidal thinks he was “always, literally, a journalist”, meaning it as praise. “In the process, he made, from time to time, essential literature, including the darkest of American novels, Pudd’nhead Wilson.”
Pudd’nhead Wilson takes up a theme Twain used elsewhere, two men living each other’s lives: in Wilson, a slave and freeman exchanged at birth; in The Prince and the Pauper, two boys who look uncannily alike; in his life, Twain and Clemens. It is fattening food for psychiatric digestion. Vidal writes “the Freudians are still on the case” and satirises a Mr Guy Caldwell’s contention that Twain suffered from “erectile dysfunction” when he was 50.
I wonder what Vidal would make of Hoffman’s insistence that, as a young adventurer in Nevada, Sam was homosexual. There is little evidence beyond his friendship with another journalist, Dan de Quille, but the analysis is lengthy. The biography abandons the issue when Sam leaves Nevada, perhaps because he went east, and Lord save him, got hisself hitched to Livy Langdon. He seems never to have strayed from her bed to either man or woman.
It was in Hartford, Connecticut, that Clemens settled into bourgeois life, raised children and became a respectable figure – what Hoffman calls his third persona, S L Clemens, Esquire. His childhood insecurity never left him. He craved acceptance by America’s literary elite and won it, outshining them all. His vast earnings from his books were eaten by investments he hoped would make his family secure, but which had the effect of impoverishing them. He salvaged himself more than once by reluctantly taking Mark Twain on the road to lecture. Long absences from home intensified a guilt he had had since childhood, that every ill that befell those he loved was his fault.
Hoffman tells the story well, but he can make it seem almost anaemic. He has sifted through everything Clemens wrote: books, notebooks, speeches, letters, accounts and journalism. The result is comprehensive, but born of the library rather than the rivers, oceans and prairies where Twain lived.
Hoffman, though, is not a fawning biographer. He does not hide Twain’s dishonesty (he was the least abashed liar in a country where lying is a professional and social requirement); social climbing (as Vidal would say, he carried his ladder wherever he went); poor judgment (his publisher-nephew, his last secretary and his butler all embezzled money from him); absurd faith in outlandish inventions (he lost fortunes on a steam pulley and a printing press, although he was moderately successful with a self-pasting scrapbook); political back-scratching (he helped his friend and benefactor Henry Rogers of Standard Oil to avoid bad publicity); and equivocation (he planned to publish an Encyclopaedia of Lynching, until he realised he would lose southern readers of his other books).
He was wildly inconsistent. He supported Grover Cleveland for the presidency, damning those who argued “against a bachelor’s fitness for President because he has had private intercourse with a consenting widow!” Yet because Maxim Gorky checked into a hotel with his mistress when he came to New York in 1905, Clemens withdrew public support from the writer and his campaign for Russian dissidents.
Despite his impressive scholarship, Hoffman cannot be forgiven the most overused cliche of our era: “Mark Twain is an American icon. . .” (italics mine: aarrgh!). He misunderstands a few issues that are peripheral to his study of Twain’s mind and work, as when he writes, “Sam found himself nearly alone in this battle against colonialism.”
Sam was far from alone. The Anti-Imperialist League came into being in 1898, two years before Sam returned from Europe and joined it. It had half a million members and was part of a larger movement that included most trade unions, small businesses and progressive farmers’ organisations.
Hoffman is excellent on the sources of the stories, the inspiration for the characters and plots. He shows in the life of Clemens the characters Twain put into novels. The biography enhances our reading, or rereading, of his works. Make your library order both. Then we can sign petitions and picket and raise hell when any are taken away. He’d enjoy that.
