Excerpts on Mark Twain

The Hartford Courant
Feb. 20, 1885
p. 2

In his latest story, Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade), by Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens has made a very distinct literary advance over Tom Sawyer, as an interpreter of human nature and a contributor to our stock of original pictures of American life. Still adhering to his plan of narrating the adventures of boys, with a primeval and Robin Hood freshness, he has broadened his canvas and given us a picture of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world. The scene of his romance is the Mississippi river. Mr. Clemens has written of this river before specifically, but he has not before presented it to the imagination so distinctly nor so powerfully. Huck Finn's voyage down the Mississippi with the run away nigger Jim, and with occasionally other companions, is an adventure fascinating in itself as any of the classic outlaw stories, but in order that the reader may know what the author has done for him, let him notice the impression left on his mind of this lawless, mysterious, wonderful Mississippi, when he has closed the book. But it is not alone the river that is indelibly impressed upon the mind, the life that went up and down it and went on along its banks are projected with extraordinary power. Incidentally, and with a true artistic instinct, the villages, the cabins, the people of this river become startlingly real. The beauty of this is that it is apparently done without effort. Huck floating down the river happens to see these things and to encounter the people and the characters that made the river famous forty years ago--that is all. They do not have the air of being invented, but of being found. And the dialects of the people, white and black--what a study are they; and yet nobody talks for the sake of exhibiting a dialect. It is not necessary to believe the surprising adventures that Huck engages in, but no one will have a moment's doubt of the reality of the country and the people he meets.

Another thing to be marked in the story is its dramatic power. Take the story of the Southern Vendetta--a marvelous piece of work in a purely literary point of view--and the episode of the duke and the king, with its pictures of Mississippi communities, both of which our readers probably saw in the Century magazine. They are equaled in dramatic force by nothing recently in literature. We are not in this notice telling the story or quoting from a book that nearly everybody is sure to read, but it is proper to say that Mr. Clemens strikes in a very amusing way certain psychological problems. What, for instance, in the case of Huck, the son of the town drunkard, perverted from the time of his birth, is conscience, and how does it work? Most amusing is the struggle Huck has with his conscience in regard to slavery. His conscience tells him, the way it has been instructed, that to help the runaway, nigger Jim to escape--to aid in stealing the property of Miss Watson, who has never injured him, is an enormous offense that will no doubt carry him to the bad place; but his affection for Jim finally induces him to violate his conscience and risk eternal punishment in helping Jim to escape. The whole study of Huck's moral nature is as serious as it is amusing, his confusion of wrong as right and his abnormal mendacity, traceable to his training from infancy, is a singular contribution to the investigation of human nature. These contradictions, however, do not interfere with the fun of the story, which has all the comicality, all the odd way of looking at life, all the whimsical turns of thought and expression that have given the author his wide fame and made him sui generis. The story is so interesting so full of life and dramatic force, that the reader will be carried along irresistibly, and the time he loses in laughing he will make up in diligence to hurry along and find out how things come out.








On Roughing It:

I spent a few evenings this week re-reading Sam Clemens’ rough and ready review of his early experiences in the Wild West, just to see how it would hold up to my memories of it. And to tell you the truth, I enjoyed it even more.

The beauty of this book is two-fold: it’s a work in which you can see the voice of the glimpse of life on the frontier written by a man who experienced it as a wide-eyed and enthusiastic youth — but also a work in which one sees the development of an authentic American voice.

The memoir — for that’s more or less what it is — covers the years between 1861, when young Sam joins his brother on a journey to his appointment as the secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory, to his eventual voyage to the recently subdued Hawaiian islands in 1866. During this span young Sam meets bandits, Pony Express riders, indians and Mormons; tries his hand and fails at dozens of occupations; becomes the untutored editor of a newspaper, burns down half a mountain range; is nearly drowned, crushed, and frozen to death; throws himself into mining and even becomes a millionaire, though only for two weeks — and does not miss an opportunity to poke fun at the “new western man” and his own callow youth.

It’s a novelistic account, by which I don’t mean that it’s organized and disciplined into some kind of strict and narrow structure — it is in fact sprawling and haphazardly organized — but that it isn’t, per se, a “factual account” of Sam Clemens experiences in the West. He’s created a fictionalized version of himself to deliver these reminiscinces, and though Sam was in all these places and met all (or most) of the characters involved, he exaggerates, embroiders and inflates from the opening pages to the final period. Not that there’s any intent of trickery — he’s writing with a broad wink. In fact, when he wants to impress upon the reader the actual truth of a thing, he pulls aside the veil of exaggeration and tells him so.

I can’t say that the entire work is a success; some of Sam’s digressions (he has no fear of stepping out of the timeline to recite an anecdote about a camel he met in the Holy Land, or to deliver a screed about the failings of the jury system) are distracting; some of the humourous set pieces fail to gel, but I often laughed out loud, and found many passages so deliciously composed, so gorgeous or hilarious that I discovered myself constantly interrupting my lady friend and reading aloud.

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that all modern American literature was inspired by Clemen’s writing, and the dry wit, droll rhythms and sheer enjoyment of the new American vernacular spring fresh from every page. I may be prejudiced in favor of anything Sam writes, and even more likely when it has to do with his life in the West. Where the mention of his pseudonym “Mark Twain” automatically evokes the Mississippi, riverboats and Huck Finn in others, for me it’s the wild west — I’m convinced that the authentic voice of the man was forged out here, and the opportunity to peek over his shoulder and live it along with him is absolutely priceless.

Criticisms:

Something is not quite right in Mark Twain's novels. The problem, as Lawrence Howe defines it in Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority, lies in Twain's contradictory approaches to authority and social control in his major novels. For while Twain's novels certainly work to undermine authoritative voices, traditions, and institutions, they also exhibit the same motivations that drive these authorities. In fact, Howe claims, Twain's novels subvert their own critical potential by circumscribing their liberating potential with a final imposition of order and control. "Double-crossed," is the way Howe describes this literary turn of novelistic discourse, and what is wrong with Twain's novels is not just his own divided attitude toward authority; rather, according to Howe, Twain, his novels, and the American ideology that impels them, all work to restrain the very cultural impulse for freedom that each promotes.

Howe integrates multiple interpretive lines of thought as he supports such hefty claims. He brings to his aid the narratological speculations of Lukacs, Bakhtin, and Said (to name a few), the cultural theories of Marx, Freud, and Foucault, and the historical interpretations of Woodward, Fliegelman, and Perry Miller. Such a wide range of perspectives enables Howe to better approach Twain's career in dialectical terms, to read Twain's works in pairs as he examines the way in which his critical response to authority wavered between the pairs and ultimately split into opposing camps. Howe, in fact, argues that Twain's novelistic involvement with the concept of authority shaped much of his career into a cyclical denial and confirmation of authority.

Howe turns first to Life on the Mississippi, a divided text that initiates this career cycle. Howe claims the book's division between Twain's recollections of his cub pilot experiences, based mostly on "Old Times on the Mississippi," and the narrative of his 1882 trip down the Mississippi, reveal a "series of staged conflicts" that provide "both a critique of oppressive control and a prototype of the novel as a genre that attempts to assert its own authority against restraining conventions" (17). The conflicts spring from the cub pilot's desire for the superior position of pilot, as Howe notes, a desire that fades beneath Bixby's and Brown's oppressive treatment. Twain, however, eclipses their control in the book's second part as he appropriates the cub-pilot's text and "subordinates the pilot's authority to that of the writer" (26). In a complex intermingling of an "oedipal element" with "patricidal defiance," Howe presents the conflicts in Life on the Mississippi as key elements in Twain's transition from the pilot Samuel Clemens to the writer, Mark Twain. And in this transition, Twain comes to know the power of novelistic discourse, Howe suggests, as he transcends the "Old Times" section of the book, an old time model of authority with its formal and epical structure of Bildungsroman, with a "narrative whose intention requires the purposeful freedom of a more expansive vision" (36).

In following this intention, however, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seem to lose their way. Tom Sawyer, as Howe points out, resembles "Old Times" in structure, as its hero learns how to construct his identity upon authoritative forms of knowledge, whereas Huck Finn aims at breaking free from those very forms. But Howe shows that even this more radical aim of Huck Finn misses its mark. Even the novel's central symbol of freedom thwarts its liberating possibilities, for the raft is no match for civilizing forces like the steamboat that rips it in half or the river's current that continuously draws it southward toward a threatening sort of civilized people. Howe carefully reveals how Huck, himself, often teeters between accepting and rejecting cultural norms and beginning with his escape from Pap exemplifies a curious American "anxiety about freedom and control"; such a problem takes on greater significance for Howe, as he casts Huck's entire narrative as a dramatization of this cultural anxiety.

Howe shifts toward another of Twain's tangles with authority in his examination of The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. On one level, he reads these two historical narratives in direct opposition. The Prince and the Pauper begins subversively enough by dismantling traditional authority only to reestablish the same by novel's end, whereas A Connecticut Yankee refuses to compromise its novelistic attack of authority. The Prince and the Pauper proves to be a more complex text for Howe, nonetheless, and he provides us with one of the more sustained readings of this novel. And here he gracefully blends historical and literary scholarship as he accounts for the social, political, and literary discourse focused on poverty and pauperism in Twain's day. Indeed, Twain's book does seem to speak to his readers' ambivalent attitudes about social conditions in general and a nostalgic desire for an aristocratic heritage even in the midst of a progressive democracy. In fact, critics often split their readings along similar lines, and Howe offers a detailed appraisal of discussions of the democratic and nostalgic thesis. And he fairly acknowledges those who think outside this critical dichotomy--Walter Blair and James Cox, for instance--but maintains that the final reestablishment of authority in The Prince and the Pauper provides a prime example of Twain's own desire for literary authority and, perhaps unconsciously, a conservative need to legitimize American culture within the trajectory of history" (135).

A Connecticut Yankee shuns such romantic links to an aristocratic past, according to Howe, as it radically attempts to reshape history in a novel manner on the American plan. Here Howe ties Hank Morgan's own attempt to remake and control the world closely to the Enlightenment project, which instilled in its final American promoters a desire for power over one's destiny, or simply power itself. And here lies the nub of Howe's own critical tale. He finds novelistic discourse and American ideology to be flawed by the philosophical perspective that produced them. Both, that is, generate a "dialectic of freedom and control that generates totalitarianism" (164). A harsh dose of interpretive light in itself, though Howe suggests that Twain's growing awareness of this literary and cultural bind nearly drove him to artistic defeat. But not quite.

Twain made a last desperate attempt, as Howe describes it, to avoid this double-cross inherent in American novelistic discourse and ideology through writing his final complete pair of novels: An American Claimant and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Howe only briefly considers An American Claimant, a narrative he claims "cops out," as it ultimately accepts the "status quo" of an American caste system, one of the primary targets of its novelistic critique. Attending more closely to Pudd'nhead Wilson, however, he makes his strongest case for the "insurmountable challenge that the American paradox of freedom and control poses for the novelist" (175). In Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain again comes up short, according to Howe, as he finds himself split in his identification with his two main characters: Roxana and Wilson. As the novel's "opposite agents of narrative control, they dramatize Twain's ambivalent desire both to subvert authority and to contain the threat of that subversion" (184). And here, Howe emphasizes, Twain inadvertently reveals a tragic flaw within his own "liberal consciousness" as he opts for containment through Wilson's clever reestablishment of conventional order. The same flaw cripples the effectiveness of the American novel in general, Howe argues, and the ideology that informs it.

No serious flaws mar Howe's book, however, as it carefully traces Twain's literary fascination with control and freedom and his ongoing resistance to and accommodation of authority. At times, however, Howe's argument tends to reduce Twain too simply to a power hungry novelist, to a writer primarily driven by an obsession with usurping authority in order to authorize his own. And Howe's method of reading Twain's major novels as dialectical pairs that fuel the author's debilitating desire for power and paradoxical attacks on authority seems a bit contrived in spots, and even unnecessary. Most of Twain's works focus on some challenge or exploration of powerful forms of authority, and Howe's clear exposition of this thematic strain needs little help from a theoretical frame of dialectical pairs. His use of Freud and Bakhtin, however, brings fresh insights into Twain's mind and work, and his analysis of the novel as a particularly American form of "cultural performance" provocatively paves the way for more inquiry along the same lines. Perhaps most importantly, Howe shows as others before him have shown, that Twain may indeed be America's most representative writer, even though what he represents remains always open to new interpretations.

More problematic, however, is the implication that Mark Twain's "seriousness" can best be appreciated by translating his fiction into a Jamesian "vocabulary." Horn's interpretive strategy throughout the book involves reading Twain's psychological fiction "in James's terms," so that, for example, "in No. 44, Twain fictionally reiterates the point James continually argues in Varieties, that [the] phenomenon of experiencing visitations from within, even if the visitor appears to be Satan himself, 'connects itself with the life of the subconscious, so- called,' and chiefly consist[s] in the straightening out of the inner self." These are James's words, employed to underscore the "seriousness" of Twain's fragmentary Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. But this approach inevitably begs the question: is Twain really in need of such translation? In the absence of a case for creative influence, what is to be gained by grafting a clinical vocabulary onto Mark Twain's most experimental efforts in fiction? Can't we appreciate the "seriousness" of his imaginative writing on its own terms, while at the same time entertaining Bruce Michelson's assertion in Mark Twain on the Loose that the essence of Twain's art lies in its unrelenting "subversion of seriousness"? It seems to me, after reading this compelling but problematic book, that until we can sustain such a paradox in our readings of Twain, we are unprepared to make sense of his complicated relation to American pragmatism and, perhaps, to William James.



While Twain's Prince and the Pauper is now looked at as a classic, Although well received, sold pretty poorly upon its release.