{"id":118219,"date":"2018-01-09T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T16:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118219"},"modified":"2018-01-10T12:07:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T17:07:52","slug":"impossibility-knowing-mark-twain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/09\/impossibility-knowing-mark-twain\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lamano Studios<\/p><\/div>\n

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Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily\u00a0Dramatic Chronicle<\/em> predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was \u201cbound to have a biographer one of these days\u2014may it be a hundred years hence!\u201d Albert Bigelow Paine\u2019s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as \u201cthe zealous champion of justice and liberty\u201d who was \u201cnever less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.\u201d As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam \u201cwas an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,\u201d as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens\u2019s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. \u201cA book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,\u201d he explained in 1899. \u201cIn these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.\u201d \u201cI speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,\u201d he declared. \u201cI can speak thence freely.\u201d In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as<\/p>\n

the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly in extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell \u2026 the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Howells replied skeptically, \u201cEven you won\u2019t tell the black heart\u2019s-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howells was correct. In the end, Sam failed to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his life in his memoirs. From the beginning, he was reticent to discuss sex, for example. \u201cThere were the Rousseau confessions,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cbut I am going to leave that kind alone.\u201d He eventually conceded to Howells that \u201cas to veracity,\u201d the entire autobiography \u201cwas a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.\u201d Sam elsewhere declared that \u201cno man dares tell the truth until after he is dead.\u201d His autobiography is so rife with inaccuracies, embellishments, exaggerations, and utter untruths that a cottage industry of naysayers has developed to debunk it. Many parts contain not so much a remembrance of things past but a remembrance of things that did not happen. As Louis J. Budd remarks, scholars who try \u201cto separate truth from yarn-spinning in his autobiographical dictation\u201d have discovered it is \u201ca mountain of funny putty.\u201d Sam Clemens\u2019s biographers must consult the autobiography with caution in reconstructing the events of his life. He never allowed the facts to interfere with a good story, such as the discovery of a blind lead in Roughing It<\/em> (1872) or his complicity in the death of a stranger in \u201cThe Private History of a Campaign that Failed\u201d (1885). Even the apologetic Paine admitted that Sam\u2019s autobiographical dictations bear \u201conly an atmospheric relation to history.\u201d Bernard DeVoto agreed that though he was one \u201cof the most autobiographical of writers,\u201d he was \u201cleast autobiographical\u201d when he tried to chronicle his life. Howard Baetzhold describes Sam\u2019s memory as \u201cfaulty\u201d and \u201cconvenient,\u201d and Hamlin Hill calls it \u201cimmensely selective.\u201d James M. Cox refers tactfully to \u201cthe magnifying lens of his imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first task of Sam Clemens\u2019s biographers, in short,\u00a0should be to sort facts from factoids or truth from truthiness, a process akin to stripping lacquer from a painting to reveal the original pigments or removing carpet to expose the grain in a hardwood floor. As Sam famously joked, when he was young, \u201cI could remember anything, whether it happened or not,\u201d but as he grew older his memories began to fade, \u201cand soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter.\u201d To arrive at some reliable account of various events, such as Sam\u2019s first lecture engagement in San Francisco in early October 1866 or his putative visit to the czar\u2019s dacha in Yalta in 1867, I have had to triangulate or quadrangulate sources. He seems to have been a yarn spinner from an early age. As his mother once allowed, \u201che is the wellspring of truth, but you can\u2019t bring up the whole well with one bucket \u2026 I discount him 30 per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In an Enterprise<\/em> column in January 1863, the month before adopting the Mark Twain pseudonym, he conceded that he had \u201ca sort of talent for posturing.\u201d As Ron Powers remarks, \u201che was forever revising his life to make it even more interesting and melodramatic than it had been.\u201d Many Clemens scholars note the extent to which he crafted his own reputation or, as Jeffrey Steinbrink has observed, \u201canybody who attempts a biography\u201d of Sam collaborates with him, since he \u201cwas in the process of constructing himself \u2026 throughout his career.\u201d Hill similarly observes that \u201cif art is a mode of dissembling, the Samuel Clemens hidden beneath his own disguise was an artist of a magnitude as yet not completely defined and barely explored.\u201d Not even Sam\u2019s travel books\u2014The Innocents Abroad<\/em> (1869), Roughing It<\/em> (1872), A Tramp Abroad<\/em> (1880), Life on the Mississippi<\/em> (1883), and Following the Equator<\/em> (1897)\u2014are entirely reliable sources about his life, despite his insistence that if \u201cthe incidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, & the result would be an autobiography.\u201d On the contrary: Hill refers, for example, to Twain\u2019s \u201cenormous violation of the facts of his biography\u201d in the construction of his narrative persona in Roughing It<\/em>. Put another way, virtually all of his major works, including his autobiography, are semiautobiographical. The statement underscores the pressing need for a complete and reliable biography of the author for what it tells us about the alchemy of his imagination. \u201cI never deliberately sat down and \u2018created\u2019 a character in my life,\u201d as he told an interviewer in 1907. \u201cI begin to write incidents out of real life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Sam Clemens enjoys a reputation unrivaled in American literary history and he was in large part the architect of that\u00a0reputation. From the start of his career, he tried to control\u00a0his public image. As early as 1871, a columnist in the Phrenological Journal<\/em> commended Sam\u2019s marketing genius: he \u201cis shrewd, and not only understands how to write and name a book, but also how to advertise it.\u201d He understood intuitively the advantages of favorable publicity and he was adept at \u201cdramatizing his celebrity,\u201d as Budd adds. In \u201cboth a literary and psychological sense, the shambling but perceptive humorist remembered as Mark Twain is a mask,\u201d according to Louis Leary, a \u201cposturing and flamboyant figure\u201d created by Clemens, who over the years sculpted his public persona and fiercely protected it. Budd has explained that Sam \u201cdid not just welcome publicity: he eagerly sought it for almost fifty years.\u201d He readily sat for interviews when they were to his advantage, as when they served to promote a book or lecture, but otherwise he was largely inaccessible. He praised his butler for learning to lie when turning away \u201cthe newspaper correspondent or the visitor at the front door.\u201d He often admonished interviewers not to publish his exact words because he could sell them for up to thirty cents apiece rather than give them away. \u201cDon\u2019t print a word of what I have said,\u201d he ordered a stringer for the New York World<\/em> in November 1900. \u201cIt is my trade to gaggle, and if I talk to reporters for nothing where\u2019s my bread and butter coming in?\u201d \u201cTo ask a man who writes for his livelihood to talk for publication without recompense is an injustice,\u201d he added in 1903. He never employed a publicist because he didn\u2019t need one or, more correctly, he saw one in the mirror. He sometimes urged his correspondents to destroy his private letters rather than jeopardize his public image, as in a postscript he sent his brother Orion and his sister-in-law, Mollie, as early as October 1865, a month before his thirtieth birthday, even before his comic sketch \u201cJim Smiley and His Jumping Frog\u201d appeared in the New York Saturday Press<\/em>: \u201cYou had best shove this in the stove\u201d because \u201cI don\u2019t want any absurd \u2018literary remains\u2019 & \u2018unpublished letters of Mark Twain\u2019 published after I am planted.\u201d Similarly, he admonished his mother and sister in January 1868, over two years later and some sixteen months before the publication of The Innocents Abroad<\/em>, his first great literary and commercial success, to read his letter \u201conly to the family, & then burn it\u2014I do hate to have anybody know anything about my business.\u201d Ironically, these letters not only survive but the texts have been published, not that Sam would have been surprised. Shortly after the birth of his youngest daughter, in 1880, he interrupted a note to his friend Joseph Twichell to admonish the future reader of his private correspondence:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Somebody may be reading this<\/em> letter 80 years hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960,) save yourself the trouble of looking further; I know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, & I will not let your eye profane them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you to know, scoffer & ribald, that the little child is old & blind, now, & once more toothless; & the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This pattern of massaging the message and spin-doctoring holds throughout his life. Late in his career, he hired a clipping service, and today the files of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, are filled with the articles he was sent. Most of his interviews in Australasia and South Africa in 1895 through 1896 are known to scholarship only because newspaper clippings of them survive in his scrapbooks.<\/p>\n

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In the course of his long career, Sam Clemens lost as many friends as he made. He did not suffer fools or rivals gladly, especially if they wore crinoline. He targeted them indiscriminately\u2014from religious leaders (e.g., Mary Baker Eddy, John Alexander Dowie, De Witt Talmage), politicians (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Tim Sullivan), fellow writers and lecturers (Bret Harte, Kate Field), to literary pirates (John Camden Hotten) and military leaders (Frederick Funston). If Sam was often loved in public, he was sometimes loathed in private. He feuded for years with C. C. Duncan, the captain of the Quaker City<\/em>, the ship that carried him and the other \u201cinnocents\u201d to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. Though he and James were both friends with Howells, neither of them could abide the other\u2019s work. If Henry James was \u201cthe Master,\u201d a careful craftsman who considered Sam\u2019s writings vulgar, then Sam was the anti-James, an improvisational artist who, as he said, \u201cwould rather be damned to John Bunyan\u2019s heaven than read\u201d The Bostonians<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Particularly early in his career, he systematically burlesqued all types of fiction and journalism (e.g., temperance literature, French novels, gothic and ghost stories, dime and detective novels, fairy tales, success stories, joke books, almanacs, theatrical reviews, sentimental romances, travel narratives, biography and autobiography, pornography, fashion articles, obituaries, interviews, medicinal and lovelorn advice columns, news reports, social columns, sportswriting, and celebrity features) as well as popular plays, operatic librettos, and Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. His hoaxes and parodies gradually evolved into social and political satire. But everything he wrote did not turn to gold, nor was every speech he delivered touched with genius. He readily violated the classical unities and ignored the standards of the well-made novel. Or as Howells remarked,<\/p>\n

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He was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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While Huck Finn<\/em> is generally hailed as a great American novel, Sam also suffered his share of reverses and disasters. He was hardly exempt from the slings and arrows of outraged critics. He published his share of flops and potboilers, such as Merry Tales<\/em> (1892), The American Claimant<\/em> (1892), and Tom Sawyer Abroad<\/em> (1894), all written when he was in the throes of financial exigency and imminent bankruptcy. All of these books clearly fall below the mark of his best writing. A consummate performer in his own right, he nevertheless cowrote with Bret Harte the play Ah Sin<\/em> (1877), the most disastrous collaboration in the history of American letters. Ambitious to succeed, he was notoriously unwise in his investments, thinking the telephone a wildcat speculation while backing such inventions as a steam pulley, a carpet-pattern machine, and a powdered food supplement made from the albumin of eggs called plasmon. In short, he\u00a0exhibited his share of human foibles, despite his modern\u00a0reputation.<\/p>\n

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Over the decades, the field of Samuel Clemens biography has often resembled a bloody battleground. The most famous critical war occurred in the late 1920s and 1930s, between the first two curators of the Mark Twain Papers, Paine and DeVoto, with Clemens\u2019s surviving daughter and heir, Clara, a self-interested spectator. In 1906, Clemens commissioned Paine, a young sycophant without a pedigree, to write his official biography. After Clemens\u2019s death in 1910, Paine managed the papers with the goal of maximizing their profitability to the Mark Twain Company and the Estate by churning out a steady stream of Twain-related books and magazine articles based on materials in the archive: e.g., the hagiographical Mark Twain: A Biography<\/em> (1912) and bowdlerized editions of Mark Twain\u2019s Letters<\/em> (1917), Mark Twain\u2019s Speeches<\/em> (1923), Mark Twain\u2019s Autobiography<\/em> (1924), and Mark Twain\u2019s Notebook<\/em> (1935). Thomas Sergeant Perry once disparaged the archival method of compiling such magisterial works. \u201cThe biographer,\u201d he wrote, \u201cgets a dustcart into which he shovels diaries, reminiscences, old letters, until the cart is full. Then he dumps the load in front of your door. That is Vol. I. Then he goes forth again on the same errand. And there is Vol. II. Out of this rubbish the reader constructs a biography.\u201d Paine tightly controlled access to the manuscripts; that is, Paine\u2019s proprietary interest in Mark Twain was at least as pronounced as Leon Edel\u2019s in Henry James a couple of generations later. He was a gatekeeper, and among those he denied entry was DeVoto, a young Harvard graduate who believed that Van Wyck Brooks had distorted the record by contending in the thesis-ridden The Ordeal of Mark Twain<\/em> (1920) that Sam\u2019s native genius had been repressed and his writings censored by his genteel wife, editors, and friends. As Brooks suggested most succinctly, \u201cthe making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist.\u201d Without rehearsing this controversy or his conflict with Paine in detail, DeVoto needed to examine the original manuscripts in order to dispute Brooks\u2019s thesis, but Paine colluded with Harper & Bros., Sam\u2019s last publisher, to refuse DeVoto access to the papers. As he advised the editors at the House of Harper,<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On general principles it is a mistake to let anyone else write about Mark Twain, as long as we can prevent it \u2026 As soon as this is begun (writing about him at all, I mean) the Mark Twain that we have \u2018preserved\u2019\u2014the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain\u2014will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his introduction to a 1980 reprinting of the authorized biography, James M. Cox concludes unequivocally that Paine \u201cacted as censor and custodian, doing all he could to preserve the life he had written and unhesitatingly denying would-be interpreters like DeVoto access to the papers.” Ironically, Paine appropriated some of Sam\u2019s manuscripts for his personal use without permission and carelessly lost other documents, including the manuscript of his brother Orion\u2019s autobiography. In the foreword to Mark Twain\u2019s America<\/em> (1932), DeVoto expressed scorn for Paine\u2019s motives and methods. When he was starting to research his book, according to DeVoto, Paine \u201cinformed me that nothing more need ever be written about Mark Twain. The canon was established, and whatever biography or criticism had to say could be found in the six pounds of letterpress that composed Mr. Paine\u2019s official Life.\u201d DeVoto observed that the furor caused by Brooks\u2019s thesis \u201crested on one marginal note quoted by Mr. Paine which accused [the primary scapegoat, Olivia Langdon Clemens] of steadily weakening the English language.\u201d DeVoto eventually concluded, too, that Sam\u2014not Livy or Howells or his other ostensible censors\u2014\u201cwas responsible for many of the euphemisms and avoidances\u201d in his writings. Paine delivered his patronizing reply in the preface to the Centenary Edition of Mark Twain: A Biography<\/em> (1935): DeVoto seemed \u201ca young man \u2026 more talented than exact\u201d and \u201cnot always pleased with the facts as he finds them \u2026 The young man plainly was not pleased with Mark Twain\u2019s choice of those to whom he trusted his literary effects\u2014his daughter, Clara, and the writer of these lines.\u201d Ironically, in 1935 DeVoto also began to contribute a popular column, \u201cThe Easy Chair,\u201d to Harper\u2019s Monthly<\/em>, and in 1938, the year after Paine\u2019s death, he was selected to succeed him as curator of the Mark Twain Papers. He remained in this office until 1946, and before his own death in 1955 he had received both a Pulitzer Prize for History and a National Book Award for Nonfiction.<\/p>\n

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Nevertheless, Brooks\u2019s contention that Sam had been crippled artistically by the censors who surrounded him, including his wife, editor Howells, and his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks, had the effect of fostering the false notion that \u201cMark Twain\u201d was his alter ego or that he suffered from a multiple personality disorder like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Twain biography became and has remained a fertile field for psychoanalytically-inclined critics. In Freudian terms, if \u201cthe Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope\u201d (Twain) was the id, then the bourgeois family man who resided in a Victorian mansion (Clemens) was the superego. \u201cThe solution for critics \u2026 at least since Brooks,\u201d according to Richard S. Lowry, has been to resolve the contradictions in his character \u201cby literally dividing him in two.\u201d Arthur G. Pettit alludes darkly to his \u201cmultiple personality.\u201d Even DeVoto, Brooks\u2019s most vocal opponent, conceded that \u201cfor a time\u201d after the death of his wife and favorite daughter Sam \u201clived perilously close to the indefinable line between sanity and madness.\u201d Paul Fatout epitomized this tendency toward armchair psychoanalysis when he tried to gauge precisely the \u201cvague and shifting\u201d line \u201cwhere Clemens yields to Twain and vice versa,\u201d as if there were \u201ctwo persons occupying the same body,\u201d which is exactly what Andrew Hoffman asserted in his biography Inventing Mark Twain<\/em> as recently as 1997. Forrest G. Robinson flirts with the same notion by claiming that \u201cthe line separating Clemens from Twain was far from clear\u201d even \u201cto the man who bore those names,\u201d though Robinson immediately qualifies his point by affirming the more conventional view: \u201cClemens was a historical person of many and complex dimensions, but there was only one of him. Mark Twain was a fiction of many and complex dimensions\u2014not the least of them his relationship to his maker\u2014but he was a fiction.\u201d That is, his ego was more intact than many critics have been willing to grant.<\/p>\n

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For decades after the publication of The Ordeal of Mark Twain<\/em>, in short, Brooks\u2019s thesis skewed the field of Clemens studies. In his 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, Sinclair Lewis betrayed Brooks\u2019s influence when he declared that Howells \u201cwas actually able to tame Mark Twain, perhaps the greatest of our writers, and to put that fiery old savage into an intellectual frock coat and top hat.\u201d According to Justin Kaplan, he was \u201ca double creature\u201d: \u201cThe Hartford literary gentleman lived inside the sagebrush bohemian.\u201d The very title of Kaplan\u2019s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain<\/em> (1966), a play on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nods in Brooks\u2019s direction, as does the milder common critical judgment that Sam was a welter of \u201ccontradictions\u201d or \u201cinconsistencies\u201d sometimes verging on the pathological. To cite only a few examples: Gladys Bellamy (\u201cMark Twain seethed with contradictions\u201d), Edward Wagenknecht (\u201cThere are contradictions in Mark Twain\u2019s attitude about himself, as in everything else about him\u201d), J. Stanley Mattson (\u201cthe contradictions in Mark Twain’s character were legion\u201d), Fred Kaplan (\u201ca man of many inconsistencies\u201d), Joseph F. Goeke (\u201cchronic vacillation, impulsiveness, and self-contradiction\u201d), and Peter Krass (\u201ca complex man who was almost schizophrenic\u201d). Gregg Camfield avers that Sam\u2019s \u201cattitudes toward the world of commerce seem confused and contradictory,\u201d particularly \u201cthe contradiction between his support of labor and his investment in a labor-supplanting machine.\u201d He was an unabashedly countercultural figure\u2014except when he was not. He also affirmed the standards of the social status quo\u2014except when he did not. While he sometimes spoke truth to power, as when he condemned the depredations of the American military in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, he almost as often spoke what he considered truth to powerlessness, as when he sued a poor hack driver for overcharging his maid on a fare and justified his action on the ground of \u201ccivic duty.\u201d He scorned hypocrisy, but he was vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy in his own right. By the end of his life he had become both king and court jester, both Lear and the Fool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This essay is excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years. Published<\/em> with permission\u00a0of University of Missouri Press.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Gary Scharnhorst is distinguished professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author and editor of nearly fifty books, including\u00a0<\/em>Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor.\u00a0He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily\u00a0Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was \u201cbound to have a biographer one of these days\u2014may it be a hundred years hence!\u201d Albert Bigelow Paine\u2019s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. 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Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain by Gary Scharnhorst<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was the architect of his own impressive literary reputation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/09\/impossibility-knowing-mark-twain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain by Gary Scharnhorst\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 9, 2018 \u2013   Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily\u00a0Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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