Even as We Speak (13 page)

He couldn’t guess it because he was a nineteenth-century figure – the hardest thing to remember when you are caught up in reading him. He seems so close in time that you
wouldn’t be surprised to look up from the book and see him talking to Larry King on television. But he can seem so familiar only because the America we like best sounds like him, not because
he sounds like it. He was there first. Even his personal weaknesses presaged the America we have come to know and like from its infinitely exportable popular culture. Twain had a weakness for
profitable schemes. The first of them did make a profit: when Twain personally published Grant’s memoirs, the deal worked out so well that he thought he had revolutionized the publishing
industry. ‘The prosperity of the venture,’ as Howells pointed out, ‘was the beginning of Clemens’ adversity, for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of
dissipation.’ Twain’s further ventures into private enterprise oscillated between a waste of time and a waste of money, not always his own. The typesetting machine he thought would
revolutionize printing eventually did so, but not his version of it. He went broke in a big way. Like Sir Walter Scott, he heroically wrote himself out of debt, but as soon as enough money
accumulated he was back into another scheme. For years, he maintained his faith in a much-publicized energy food, which in his time performed the same function as the vitamin pills that the British
bodice-ripper author Barbara Cartland so enthusiastically favours now – that of helping naturally energetic people convince themselves that they are medically savvy beyond the ken of
doctors.

Yet Twain, for all his susceptibility to plausible wheezes, was no crank. He was crazy about know-how. He was a can-do merchant, a prototype for Gyro Gearloose and all those nutty inventors who
go on building weird machines in the back-yard sheds of American popular culture, even in the space age. And after all, some of the machines work. Twain’s typesetting machine almost did.
Twain was in tune with the mechanical efflorescence of the new nation. For him, there was no separation between machinery and poetry. You couldn’t even call him a proto-Futurist, because for
him art and machinery had never grown apart to the point of needing to be reunited. He had been brought up to the practical. The printing house was his high school and the riverboat his university.
He could make things work. It was one of the qualities that the women of Paris loved about the liberating American troops of 1944 – all those Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns who rode six to a
jeep. It wasn’t just that they could get you chocolate and sheer stockings: when they had finished kissing you, they could fix your bicycle.

If that sounds like sentimentality now, it is only because of the devastating effect on America’s image, and especially its self-image, wrought by the Vietnam War. Since
then, instead of a jeep full of smiling boys with girls jumping in to join them we think first of scowling men tumbling out of a helicopter to torch a village. We think of some fat-bottomed
sergeant checking crates of ice-cream-making equipment off a C-130 at Cam Ranh Bay while the local girls are being sold into prostitution outside the wire, of the CIA supervising torture sessions
in which the questions and the answers are both in a language they don’t understand except for the screams. America cast itself as the villain and agreed when the rest of the world hissed.
Actually, there was reason even at the time to believe that the average grunt was more remarkable for his kindness than for his insensitivity to an alien culture. Later on, even the Italian
journalist Oriana Fallaci – whose articles (especially her interview with Kissinger, the granting of which he subsequently called the most stupid mistake he ever made) did so much to put
America in the bad light that many Americans conceded was deserved – changed her tune. Interviewed in her turn by the Italian magazine
King
, she said that her abiding memory of
Vietnam was of how well-mannered the American boys had been, even when they didn’t have the slightest idea of where they were or what they were supposed to be doing there.

Vietnam was only part of a postwar pattern in which the United States, whether by accident or design, propped up the kind of authoritarian regimes whose sinister luminaries wore dark glasses
indoors. All too often, especially in Latin America, it was by design.
Realpolitik
was held to be mandatory. But the real trouble with
realpolitik
was that it wasn’t real.
In foreign policy, ruthlessness undid the best thing America had going for it: benevolence. In the Western countries, it handed the Marxist intellectuals an opportunity – ultimately fatal to
them, since it encouraged them to stay Marxist long after their opposite numbers in the East had given up – to misinterpret twentieth-century history. It became temptingly easy to argue that
the machinations of American foreign policy were what had stopped the Western European countries from going fully socialist after the Second World War. But American Machiavellianism wasn’t
what did that. What did it was American generosity: the Marshall Plan. The same applied to the occupation of Japan. The Japanese economic superstate that we are now all so concerned about was made
possible by America. If that was Machiavellianism, it was of a strangely self-defeating kind.

Diehard opponents of the American Empire – on this subject Gore Vidal remains determined to be only half as clever as he is – insist that America rebuilt the defeated nations only to
secure markets, and so forth. This seductive notion first took off along with the economies of the rebuilt nations. Quite often, it was noised abroad in newspapers and magazines that owed their
editorial freedom to guarantees insisted upon by the victorious allies, with America in the forefront. Suspicion of American power became harder to quell as American power went on increasing.
Perhaps that was a good thing: about power, suspicious is the way we should always be. But to focus on America’s misuse of its economic and military strength was to abdicate the obligation,
and the opportunity, to talk about the aspect of American power that actually worked – its cultural influence, the thing that made America irresistibly attractive even after it had just
finished dropping bombs on you.

The Japanese had been told that the American GIs would rape their women. The threat was easy to believe, since the right to rape civilians was an unofficial but commonly granted reward for
conquest in the Imperial Japanese Army. But in the American Army of Occupation the penalty for rape was imprisonment or death. When the GIs handed out gum instead, the Japanese got the point in the
first five minutes. The Germans had got the point while the war was still on. German civilians threatened with liberation by the Russians headed in the opposite direction. Surrendering to the
Americans became the rule in the
Wehrmacht
when the SS or the military police weren’t watching. Any defeated nation had something with which to compare America – itself as it
had previously been. America’s allied nations, their gratitude either tinged by jealousy or annulled by it, were less inclined to admire but just as bound to compare: America was their
measure, whether as a challenge or as a threat. America’s problem was that it had no standard of comparison except its own ideal of itself.

The problem got worse, and by now it is acute. This is where America’s congenital insulation from the less fortunate contemporary world, and its isolation from the needy past brought about
by abundance in the present, has played the Devil. Both from the right and from the left, America attacks itself for lapsing from its supposedly normal condition as the ideal state. But the ideal
state is a platonic concept destined to be even more frustrating than platonic love. For the Right, modern America is a disappointing lapse from godliness, purity, and order. For the Left, modern
America is a disappointing lapse from social justice. Increasingly, the argument between them is about language and its legalistic interpretation, with the Constitution as the unquestioned yet
ineffable ur-document, as if God’s will were literally a will, leaving everything he ever owned to America, but on certain conditions, all of which conflict.

In sober moments, we know that the Constitution of the United States would mean nothing without the laws that grow out of it and back it up. Without them, the rights it promulgates would be no
better guaranteed than those enshrined in the old Soviet Constitution, a document that, as the dissident sociologist Alexander Zinoviev suggested, was published only in order to find out who agreed
with it, so that they could be dealt with.

Americans, however, are less inclined to realize that the laws would mean nothing without the spirit that gave rise to them, and that this spirit was first made manifest in the country’s
classic literature. To see the problem, it helps to be outside America looking in. Angst at falling short of its dreams for itself has sapped the country’s initial confidence that it could
alter circumstances in its own favour: the lure of the ideal has stymied the practical. It is a dream to imagine that even the most comprehensive laundering of language would expunge racism from
human consciousness. The realistic alternative is to deny racist consciousness practical expression. It won’t be easy, but to disarm the population would be a good start. A start can’t
be made, though, because the gun lobby has too much power. On this point, as on so many others, left-wing idealists and right-wing idealists work in a fearful synergy to undo the possibility of
practical government. Seemingly conflicting interests have combined to erode an institution.

As a more recent institution, one that is actually still growing rather than falling apart, the Library of America provides a heartening example of what can be done. Perhaps it
will give courage to people who would like to see public television properly funded. In the United States, public-service institutions, unless they are operating in a field where private enterprise
has no urge to compete, are in the position of a heresy against an orthodoxy. But in matters of the mind they are essential to the nation’s health. Twain was in no doubt on the point. In
1898, having grown old in the new country, he warned against the consequences of a free-market culture. Thirty years before, he said, Edwin Booth had played Hamlet a hundred nights in New York. Now
Hamlet was lucky to get a look-in. Comparing the Burg Theatre, in Vienna, with Broadway, he thought Broadway was nowhere. ‘You are eating too much mental sugar; you will bring on
Bright’s disease of the intellect.’

As we now know, Broadway was to be the
fons et origo
of twentieth-century popular culture in its most sophisticated form: the musical show. But Twain still had a right to speak, because
the popular culture that was on its way wouldn’t have been the same without him. What he couldn’t guess – because he was only a genius, not a clairvoyant – was that it would
go so far, that entertainment would become, on such a scale, mere entertainment. Modern America is a society of abundance in almost every aspect, even when it comes to quality. The visitor who
prides himself on his sophistication is first startled, then benumbed, to find that everything he thought treasurable where he came from is present in America, only more so. If he is interested in
the Books of Hours of the early Renaissance, he will find the world’s greatest collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library. He can be a world expert on Ming vases and still not survive the
shock of turning a corner on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles to find a glass-fronted warehouse chock-full of them. There are classical-music lovers in London who pay for a return plane trip from New
York with what they save buying a suitcaseful of CDs at American prices. A few years ago, in a music shop on Broadway, I reached into a discount bin and fished out a boxed set of cassettes of the
Mahler First and Second Symphonies in the touchstone performances conducted by Bruno Walter. Five bucks. It made me annoyed that I had previously paid so much, and then afraid that I was not paying
enough. The precious was practically free. It was value without price.

But that doesn’t offset the menace of price without value. The abundance isn’t intelligently distributed, and never could be by a free market, whose famous invisible hand is
incurably short of a brain. Unless public-service institutions are made robust, the art will go to the élite that knows what it wants, while those who might have wanted it but never found
out about it are stuck with the junk. Twain was an élitist: when he punished Cooper for supposing that ‘more preferable’ was a more impressive way to say ‘preferable’
he was saying that literary expression isn’t just self-expression. But he would have been appalled to be told in advance that the enlightenment of the American people was going to be a matter
of niche marketing. He would have regarded that, surely correctly, as a boondoggle.

Though beset by remorse for his own failings, Twain had a sure sense of his rank, but he didn’t imagine that he had attained it by his own unaided efforts. He had an institution to help
him – the world literary heritage, which he regarded as belonging to America by right, because America was the world’s country. Twain’s own contribution, daring in every way, was
most daring in its dedication to the principle that the institution belonged to the people, and not to its adepts. He was a man so superior he needed no support from self-esteem. One wonders
whether the Kaiser, for once in his life face to face with a real aristocrat, realized the implications.

They weren’t revolutionary – not politically, anyway. Though a devout republican at home, Twain abroad had a soft spot for monarchs. But culturally he was a bigger revolutionary than
Karl Marx, and, in the long run, more successful, because what Marx started went backward in the end, while the popular culture to which Twain gave such a boost has gone on expanding. Doing that,
it has necessarily left him behind. The precocious modernity that makes him seem so close to us can only obscure, not obviate, the dependence of his inspiration on a more immediate world than any
we know – or anyone will ever know again, unless the industrialized world dismantles itself. The young Twain rode on stagecoaches and talked to strangers. He saw people murdered. Death and
disease struck his family at a time when such things didn’t happen just to other people; they happened to everybody. Life has improved, but in improving it has grown less real, and there is
no going back except through a disaster.