By Michael F. Duggan
It is no exaggeration to report that Samuel Clemens died one hundred twelve years ago this past Wednesday (April 21, 1910), but that Mark Twain lives on. Mostly.
A dark and brooding man—an atheist who railed against God during his last years in works to be published after his death1—Twain transformed humor. He took the 19th century public lecture format and invented standup comedy. A Confederate deserter, he was an anti-racist (he sponsored the first African-American student to attend Yale Law School), an anti-imperialist, and is arguably the first modern American liberal. He practiced gonzo reporting a century before anybody had ever heard of Hunter S. Thompson or the New Journalism.2 As Arthur Miller observes, Twain always included himself in his criticisms of humanity. On that score and so many others, he was completely honest. By his own account, he was not “an American,” he was “the American.”
Although I cannot deny the greatness of his best novels, or that he is our greatest novelist, I have never been able to make it all the way through Huckleberry Finn. I prefer him as an aphoristic philosopher, a misleadingly folksy wit with depth—the “American Voltaire”—and I can (and have) spent hours browsing the three collections of his quotes and sayings that I own. He is as sharp as Dorthy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde, but with more resonance and heft; the point remains after the smile fades. Humor is the most fleeting of genres, and yet Twain remains as funny, thoughtful, topical, and damning as ever.
The only thing I don’t get about Twain is that he seems to have been free of all prejudices except against Native Americans. I suspect that he may have had a bad experience with an American Indian when he was young (see “Injun Joe”).
Another possibility is that he has to deny Indigenous Americans if his literature is to work (i.e. stories of an America with no past, no inconvenient previous owners). In the Ken Burns documentary on Twain, Arthur Miller (again) observes that Twain wrote about America as if it had no history. If the shores of the Mississippi that Huck and Jim drift on are crowded with the ghosts of dead peoples and civilizations who speak without a Missouri twang, it suddenly becomes distracting and complicated, like all true history. This, in my opinion, is the central problem with Twain.
But on the whole, Twain works. He hated shams and frauds and could see through to the underlying all-too-human motives, including his own (“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner”). He believed that the best punchline was often an honest straight line. He also loathed echo chambers and one can only wonder what pearls of wisdom he would have had about today’s social media.
Notes
- “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!” —The Mysterious Stranger, 240-41.
- See Alexander Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck, 297.