Perhaps on account of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually to such figures as Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres, and David Letterman--most recent honoree is Julia Louis-Dreyfus--Twain is frequently regarded as "a humorist," which, while not plain wrong, is off course by a mile or more. Dickens isn't generally thought of as "an English humorist." A truer estimate of Twain's just place in American culture was set out by his friend, the novelist William Dean Howells, who in My Mark Twain wrote: "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all--sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
I just found out that if you google "Mark Twain Prize," the graphic right below the first return, for the Wikipedia article, is "People also ask" and includes the question: "Is Mark Twain related to Shania Twain?" That would be a No. The author's "Twain" is the pen name of Samuel Clemens and the singer's is for the man her mother married after divorcing her father. So neither one is a Twain! Mariel Hemingway, however, is the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, who, backing up Howells, said that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Keep all this in mind if you ever go on Jeopardy!
An accepted opinion regarding Twain's career holds that he started out as a sunny humorist, became progressively more cynical and pessimistic, and that his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was composed in midlife, when the scale was briefly in uneasy equilibrium. An alternate view might be that the darkness and savagery were always present, but, as he got older, more famous and successful, he was less inclined to bury it, or disguise it, and in his greatest work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the strands oscillate, Huck and Jim's raft trip down the mystic Mississippi being interrupted by the perversions of "the damned human race" every time they have to tie up and go ashore.
Twain's savagery isn't usually highlighted, perhaps because it was often directed against Christianity, at least as practiced in America, post-Civil War. Though he himself was a participant in the money-making frenzy, his disdain for it--he was responsible for the term "Gilded Age"--was bottomless when piety got mixed in with the rapacious acquisitiveness, as witnessed by his 1901 "updated" version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic:
In a sordid slime harmonious, Greed was born in yonder ditch;
With a longing in his bosom--for other's goods an itch;
Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich;
Our God is marching on.
The reader of Huck Finn will detect similar notes--in Huck's assessment of the religious training he receives while living with the Widow Douglas, in Judge Thatcher's theft of Huck's money (abetted by Huck's indifference). But it's true that in the work of the mature but not old Mark Twain, the one who created Huckleberry Finn, the ugliness, filtered through the sensibility of the boy narrator, seems bearable. What to say about that sensibility? The critic Lionel Trilling loved the following passage, from the beginning of the book, when Huck is still hanging with Tom Sawyer and the boys, before he teams up with the Widow's slave. They've snuck out at night to pursue their adventures, a recurring event in the "boys' books":
Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hill-top, we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, may be; and the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and awful still and grand. We went down the hill and found Jo Harper, Ben Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard. So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.
I think this is the first hint in the book of Mark Twain's conception of the mystic Mississippi, and it's felt by Huck--doesn't seem likely that Tom or Ben or one of the unnamed others, had any of them been narrating, would ever have thought to include the "ever so fine" or "awful still and grand." The detail attracting Trilling's attention, however, was the way that Huck connects the few twinkling lights to townspeople up in the middle of the night keeping a sick watch. When Huck and Jim later meet up with human folly along the shore of the river, the details come to us through Huck's consciousness, humane, sympathetic, decent, pure, accepting, calm despite often reporting himself to be "all in a sweat"--invariably over the troubles of others and including those of murderers, grifters, runaway slaves. The chronology isn't right, but Huck Finn might have grown up to be Walt Whitman, the other most plausible candidate for "the Lincoln of our literature."
Comments