The Portable Mark Twain (2 page)

In any event, these two statements, made approximately forty years apart, will serve well enough to bracket the career of Mark Twain. Those same four decades provide a vast reservoir of writings from which to gather up representative features of Twain's art and genius—secular sermons and tall tales; vicious wisecracks and tender comedy; testaments of political outrage and deep compassion; antic, and sometimes merely silly, comic indulgence.
The Portable Mark Twain
means to give as complete a picture as possible of Twain's art and comedy. But the complete corpus of Twain's prodigious output is anything but “portable.” When one lumps together, in addition to the writings published in his lifetime, the approximately 12,000 extant letters, the voluminous notebooks, the speeches, the unpublished and (in his mind) unpublishable writings, the unfinished manuscripts, not to mention the “Autobiography” itself, some 2,500 pages in typescript, one is tempted to conclude something that is manifestly untrue: Here was a man who had no life apart from writing. But, in fact, for good or ill, he gave over a great deal of time to his business concerns, to his friends and family, to his search for one sort of health cure or another, to his cockamamie schemes for world betterment and personal profit (ranging from food additives to an ingenious bed clamp to keep the baby's covers on), and to his vast and diverse reading. Add to this the hundreds of thousands of hours of talk, acres and acres of the stuff—spontaneous after-dinner monologues, hundreds of newspaper interviews, peripatetic chatter with comrades, or improvised bedtime stories for the children—and one soon enough recognizes that Twain's writings formed only a part, and perhaps not the best part, of the man.

Still, as a matter of simple “coverage” of his written work, this anthology casts a wide enough net to catch the flavor and inexhaustible variety of the man at nearly every stage of his life. At the very least, his salient qualities are here. Those qualities are several, and all their possible combinations make them virtually unnumbered. William Dean Howells, in a review of
Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old
(1875), named the characteristic traits of the humorist. Twain is a master of “burlesque,” though, Howells adds, in its special tendency to double back on itself, his travesty acquires a novel subtlety and suppleness. He has a “fine, forecasting humor,” by which I think Howells meant that the author has an ambulatory style that, on the promise of some joke as yet unspotted, engenders in his readers an eager willingness to follow wherever he might lead. Twain is finely “American” in his boisterous “extravagance of statement”; he is reassuringly trustworthy and amiable in his “incorruptible right-mindedness”; and his delightful “dryness,” his apparent oblivion to his own comedy, permits readers, under the spell of his crafty art, to feel smarter than perhaps they should.

More important than all these, Howells detected a “growing seriousness of meaning in the apparently unmoralized drolling.” In California, Twain had sometimes been called the “Moralist of the Main,” and several of his journalistic pieces left his indignant seriousness in little doubt. However, Eastern readers knew Twain as the literary comedian and not much more. Howells was doing the humorist a service in pointing out this other dimension of the man. In fact, Howells singled out “A True Story” as much the best piece in the collection and a sketch generally misunderstood by critics who, expecting a joke and not wanting to be left out, altogether missed the “rugged truth” of this moving story of slave life. This is a reasonably complete list of Twain's gifts, and I would add only Louis J. Budd's identification of a “quintessentially Twainian quality”—“an emotional-intellectual drive, an integrative, pleasure-sharing ability to soar above or outside of commonly accepted experience.” That flight from ordinary experience at times may have been mere escape from trials and tribulations, but as often, as Budd observes, it provided the author a special pleasure that one might justifiably call “ecstasy.”

For several decades, it has been fashionable to think of Clemens as having been cooped up and hemmed in (whether he was restrained by the inheritance of a Calvinist conscience, the pressures of a pervasive Victorian gentility, or some perverse inner check hardly matters). He sometimes complained that the world at large valued him only as a funny man, incapable of deep conviction and firm principle, but that may or may not mean he was disposed to be secretly subversive of the prevailing order. Of course Twain himself invites such psychoanalytical second-guessing when he confesses to his frustration with the occupation of humorist, as he did, for example, in an 1875 letter to Howells, by complaining his customary audience required him to “paint himself stripèd and stand on his head every fifteen minutes.” When Clemens first adopted the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863, he likely felt some liberation in the persona. Mark Twain appears in a variety of guises (as the tenderfoot, the dandy, the muggins, and so forth) but always in ways that are far less complicated than was the author himself. Still, in disguise, Clemens could speak more forthrightly than he might in his own person. Eventually, however, he began to complain that the public had not got him “focused” right and thought of him as perpetually jolly and decidedly unserious. Humor was his bread and butter, but often it was a bitter portion to swallow. This dilemma must have eventually contributed something to the deterministic philosophy he adopted in later years.

Twain's late philosophic meditations, expressed in “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901),
What Is Man?
(1906), and elsewhere, merely added quasi-intellectual support to a long-standing conviction that conduct and thought are imposed from without. The average man or woman desires above all else, he argued, a sense of self-approval that can only be had by gaining the approval of others. Similarly, the approval of the public required Twain to perform antics of one sort or another that, in their turn, became a humiliation to himself and his family. Small wonder that he should complain that truthful and frank expression is all but impossible. Still, it is at least thinkable that the author's levity stemmed not simply from a desire to please or to be evasive or to subvert, but because he couldn't help himself. Perhaps he was addicted to the ecstatic privilege that such flights above and beyond earth-bound decorum and right thinking might afford.

What is more certain, at any rate, is that he was good at it. At a dinner honoring Andrew Carnegie in 1907, for example, Twain gave a speech and found his comic opportunity in Carnegie's promotion of simplified spelling. “He's got us all so we can't spell anything,” Twain fumes. Any rational reformer would address the root of the problem—the alphabet:

 

Who, in the history of humankind, ever
tried
to do a St. Vitus's dance? And did the person who put the “h” in “gherkin” do it as a prank, or was it an act of malice prepense, purposely designed to bring about sunspots? And now that the problem has at last been properly diagnosed, who else but Mark Twain would have the nerve to sic the great Andrew Carnegie on it?

Early and late, Twain was capable of such antic comedy. As often as not, it supports rather than contests prevailing moral opinion. In a speech called “Advice to Youth” (1882) Twain advises young boys and girls not to “meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created.” He continues: “You don't have to take aim even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can't hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time, at a hundred.” Here, Twain is having it both ways. He is outrageous in expression. How did the youth come by a Gatling gun and why on earth does he want to fire on a cathedral? But he is very conventional in his outlook. After all, what could be more agreeable and proper to his Victorian audience than to warn children away from guns? Twain has at once satisfied his audience that he is the master humorist of the age and bolstered his image as a moral sage, but one free of any familiar finger-wagging or fustian rhetoric.

The material for humor seemed to be constantly available to him. There is of course the comedy of situation. His notebook germ for
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(1889) is an inventory of comic possibilities:

 

The humorous situation was only one of many weapons in his comic arsenal.

There was also the comedy of animals—of moulting cows, asthmatic horses, insomniac clams, and swearing blue jays. There was the comedy of customs—of burials (of the stalwart Buck Fanshaw or the unlucky William Wheeler, who got nipped by the machinery of a carpet factory and had to be buried “just so”); and of sentimental grief (expressed in the morbidly bad poetry of Emmeline Grangerford, alas). There was the comedy of vegetables (of Simon Erickson's fanatic desire to grow turnips as a vine or Pudd'nhead Wilson's acute adage: “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”). There was comedy in holidays and hospitality, in sacred places and in slang; there was comedy in apprenticeship and penmanship, in clothes, furniture, and scripture, in undertakers and editors. Amazingly, with such imaginative power at his disposal, Twain never really pressed his advantage. He did not condescend to his created characters, no matter how mean their condition or amusing their idiom. Nearly always, Twain refused to play the humorist as bully; he preferred to pick on someone or something his own size or at times much bigger. Two notable exceptions are to be found in his treatment of the particularly vulnerable states of Arkansas and New Jersey, however.

As a purely chronological matter, this collection includes diverse specimens of his writing, beginning in 1865 with the publication of the famous jumping frog story and continuing throughout his writing career to his last years. And if
The Portable Mark Twain
does not exhaustively survey the author's professional life, it at least touches upon nearly every important phase of it. In a letter to an unidentified correspondent, Twain confessed that he confined himself in his writings to “familiar” experience. That experience was diverse, he reported, and included stints as jour printer, pilot, soldier, prospector, journalist, publisher, lecturer, and the like. The inventory ends with this revealing disclosure: “I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.” Ass or no, Clemens nevertheless dramatized his recollected experience with an exquisite attention to detail and mood. There are in “Early Days” (1907) delicious memories of the time spent on his uncle John Quarles's farm close to his birthplace in Florida, Missouri. In “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) Clemens vividly recalls his childhood ambitions in Hannibal and his awkward apprenticeship under the seasoned riverboat pilot, Horace Bixby. There are comic pictures of “the boys” in Nevada Territory, of Twain himself tearfully grieving at the tomb of Adam or puzzling over the vast canvasses of the Old Masters. There are the biting satires of colonial endeavor and the decimation of native populations, and the almost but not quite reverential description of the Sea of Galilee seen by starlight.

In matters of geography, too, this volume is reasonably comprehensive. The great Mississippi River valley receives the greatest space, and this is as it should be, if for no other reason than it is the setting of his masterpiece,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
There are also specimens from his actual travels in the Holy Land and in Germany and Italy and his round-the-world tour made in 1895-96, as well as the wholly fantastic journeys to Camelot and the Garden of Eden (magically transported to Niagara Falls). Twain had Pudd'nhead Wilson say in one of his maxims, I have “traveled more than any one else and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.” This is arrant nonsense, of course. If David Wilson, attorney at law, a.k.a. the “pudd'nhead,” had had a lick of sense or an ounce of self-respect, he would have left Dawson's Landing instantly. Instead, he perversely lingered most of his life fashioning maxims for his “Calendar,” collecting fingerprints, and living among people who had decided from the moment he stepped off the boat that he was a “lummox,” a “labrick” and many other unflattering things.