Mark Twain as Literary Whipping Boy Essay by Nigey Lennon Featured in BBR April 1996 Mark Twain (1835-1910) was the greatest writer America ever produced. The breadth of his intellect, coupled with the conversational eloquence of his writing style, has gone to make him, in his day and ours, that literary rarity: a high-minded, risk-taking author with an enormous popular following. Twain came by this distinction honestly. At a time when polite literature affected a rococo tone, full of strained and often false gracenotes, Twain's writing was closer to the speech of the average American: idiomatic and straightforward to the point of bluntness. Unlike most of his 19th-century literary contemporaries, Twain acquired his craft in the cubbyholes of Western newspapers rather than in Ivy League universities or New England literary salons. That journalism-influenced populism, while it won Twain countless followers, has always made him a cheap and easy target among the class to which he never belonged. The Huck Finn controversy has been with us since its publication in 1884; the fact that considerable debate over the book is still raging today is a testimony to Twain's timelessness both in subject and in tone (what other 19th-century author still commands cover appearances in Time, Life, and People?). At the time of its publication, Huck Finn was both praised as a work of conscience and derided as too coarse for a presumably genteel readership. The controversy revolved, then as now, around the character of the black slave Jim, and the moral nature of the relationship between Jim and the poor white trash Huck. In the postbellum United States, the dissension, as might be expected, split into two camps: the Southerners who couldn't understand why Jim was portrayed in such a sympathetic light, especially by a man whose parents had owned slaves and really ought to have known better; and the Northerners who admired the book's humanistic bent but privately deplored what New Englander Bret Harte, who edited Twain's first book, The Innocents Abroad, had referred to as Twain's "rather broad and Panurge-like" style of expression. Twain always has divided literary critics and commentators into sharp factions. Following his death in 1910 came a trickle, then a flood, of analyses of his life, work, and influences. The precedent, however, was set in the 1920s, when Van Wyck Brooks published The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Brooks's book was the first to utilize a crude sort of Freudianism on its subject, reducing Twain to an infantile personality and accusing him of remaining perennially mired in adolescence. This approach was speedily and universally recognized by Bernard DeVoto and others as a handy way to deal with Twain, whose radicalism had always caused a shudder among many litterateurs. One could hardly dismiss Twain's contribution to American writing, but by whittling away at his personality, undermining it with nicely shaded observations about his psychological peccadilloes and going into minute detail about their origins, one could render him instantly fatuous and ultimately contemptible without appearing overtly malicious. For the next sixty years, it was fashionable for Twain biographers to amuse themselves with junkets across Twain's mental and emotional geography, meanwhile de-emphasizing the intellectual tone of his work. These tactics reached an absolute nadir during the Cold War era with the release of two books: Twain's Autobiography as edited by Charles Neider, and Justin Kaplan's general biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. The original Autobiography, published in two volumes in 1924, was a rambling mass of anecdotes, dictated, rather than written out, by the author in the final years of his life. In the course of imposing a pattern on the formless work, Neider in 1959 reduced the two volumes to one, cutting the original by more than half. It is interesting to contemplate the nature of the material cut. In the original, Twain alternates straightforward biographical detail with what in essence are little speeches about the volatile political scene in 1906-7, when he was engaged in the dictation of his memoirs. His random observations include scathing commentaries on imperialism, expressions of sympathy for the Russian revolution of 1905, his horror at the emergence of large-scale conglomerates like Standard Oil, his recognition of the necessity for labor unions (one of the best chapters in Life on the Mississippi was about the history of the Pilots Benevolent Association), and numerous other subjects evidently deemed unfit for popular consumption in the "I Like Ike" era. The Neiderized Twain Autobiography, by contrast, could have been the autobiography of almost any late-19th-century popular author. It's an orderly procession of reminiscences of "old times on the Mississippi", good old days in Hannibal, the decorous life of a New England man of letters in Hartford, family life -- and not a shred of radical sentiment beyond the "liberty, equality, and Fourth of July" variety. You can't make a dead man lie, maybe, but you can certainly make him misrepresent the truth, if you're slick enough. Justin Kaplan's literary offenses were worse. In Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, he turned a masterful writing style to the task of presenting Twain as a gold-digger who sniffed out pay dirt in the literary circles of New England, and who lay siege to his future wife Olivia Langdon in order to gain entry into that charmed circle. (In actuality, Twain harbored no illusions about the Eastern literary establishment; he merely recognized the simple fact that, if he wished to establish any lasting reputation as an author, he needed to be where the publishers were.) True to some perverse law of the universe, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain entered the biographical pantheon as the Mark Twain biography, becoming widely accepted even though it revealed nothing about half its subject's life and played mighty fast and loose with the facts involved in the other half. Bret Harte wasn't the only delicate soul to find Twain's vigorous speech offensive. There have been many others, most recently the bestselling author Jane Smiley in an article in Harper's entitled "Say It Ain't So, Huck". Smiley, best known for her humorous novel about academic life, Moo, starts out with a bombshell. Having just re-read Huckleberry Finn after many years, she closes the book, stunned. "Yes, stunned," she says. "Not, by any means, by the artistry of the book but by the notion that this is the novel all American literature grows out of, that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel." Smiley, perhaps predictably, attributes the wide acceptance of Huck Finn to the cheerleading squad of what she calls "the Propaganda Era", 1948-1955 -- Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch et al. It was, she infers, strictly a boys' club, which explains why somebody like Hemingway would make his comment that all American literature grows out of one book, and all that. These guys were evidently too busy drinking and attending bullfights to notice that Huck Finn is sloppily written, morally ambiguous, and far less noteworthy than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. "There goes Uncle Tom's Cabin, there goes Edith Wharton, there goes domestic life as a subject, there go almost all the best-selling novelists of the 19th century and their readers, who were mostly women," says Smiley bitterly of this male bastion of critics and their stranglehold on literary opinion. She goes on to insist that she would rather have her children read Uncle Tom's Cabin than Huck Finn, because Stowe presents slavery as it was, rather than filtered through Twain's ambivalent Mugwump sentiments. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, when Twain was a 17-year-old printer's apprentice. (When Twain moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1870, Stowe, by then middle-aged and charitably regarded as the village eccentric, became his next-door neighbor.) While the sincerity of Uncle Tom's Cabin cannot be denied, there is a reason why it (and other books like it that cannot stand the transition from one era to another) is not read today. Stowe's novel is a melodramatic tract. In it, there are no characters with the shading of Huck or Jim, only "good guys" (the slaves) and "bad guys" (their owners). A bestseller during the Civil War, after 1865 the book, having served its purpose, became redundant, and rapidly fell from prominence. Even a cursory glance at it today shows that it is a period piece, pure and simple. By contrast, it is precisely Twain's speech-derived style, and the very human moral ambiguity that drives critics like Smiley around the bend, that make Huck Finn timeless. Literal-minded writers, from Bret Harte on down, have often mistaken Twain's idiomatic language for vulgarity, and his depiction of things as they are, as morally reprehensible. This sort of thinking has its roots in Victorian morality, with its attempt to confine ethical matters in one of two absolute categories -- Good or Evil. And in fact Twain often made slighting reference to the Horatio Alger school of children's writing that was so popular during his era. In essays like "The Good Little Boy and the Bad Little Boy" he satirized the Sunday school view of ethics and morality that dominated the popular literature of his day. It's a literary ruse that for all its transparency has always buffaloed critics like Kaplan, Neider, and Smiley -- they can't see the moralist behind the humorist, or the gray-haired philosopher behind the wisecracking adolescent. Such folks evidently need the stentorian tones of a Harriet Beecher Stowe, or the terminal politesse of a Henry James, to convince them that they are reading Literature and not something less exalted. Jane Smiley, in her Harper's essay, clearly views Mark Twain as an unruly little boy--a stance that, ironically, echoes the viewpoint of many members of the good-old-boys' critics club she despises. She concludes her essay: "If "great" literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory." Pardon me while, in the interest of politeness, I stifle a morally ambiguous little laugh. Nigey Lennon is the author of two books on Mark Twain, the most recent of which is The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California (Marlowe). Her current book is Being Frank: My Time With Frank Zappa (California Classics Books). &copy1996. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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