North America
An American in a hurry. Mark Twain was in permanent overdrive, always searching for his next big break. George Walden looks back on a restless genius whose life embodied that of the country he came from
Published 06 February 2006
Mark Twain: a life
Ron Powers Scribner, 715pp, £25
ISBN 0743248996
''We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer." It could almost have been one of the over-the-top introductions by local worthies to the sell-out lectures, delivered in deadpan style with "snappers" to clinch the jokes, that Mark Twain was to give all his life. In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this in 1844, when America's Homer was a nine-year-old urchin tuning his lyre in the scruffy village of Hannibal, on the banks of the Mississippi.
Samuel Clemens (his real name) was not quite the poet of America Emerson had in mind, but he was its genius. His life resembles the story of 19th- century America for the very good reason that it was that story. Like similar places all over the States, Hannibal prospered swiftly into small-town status. Though Clemens was the son of impoverished lower-middle-class parents, opportunities were there and he grabbed them. Having mastered printing by his teens and tried his hand at local journalism, he felt the pull of the river, and by 25 he had become a qualified pilot. Next was a move west, to steer clear of the civil war and get rich in the gold rush, which he picturesquely failed to do; he saw the shoot-outs and the hard drinking and the brothels, but no gold.
Then it was modish San Francisco, where an ever-expanding press was greedy for copy, and Clemens learned to write colourfully about things that had not undergone the formality of taking place. Next it was New York, then frenetic international travel, then the book-writing that made him, the sales driven up by lecturing tours at $100 a time (about $1,500 today). Then came his masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the years of celebrityhood that were to follow. But there was no relaxing. Clemens, like America, was in permanent overdrive, forever looking for the big break that would enrich him, whether by patent inventions (a glass hand-grenade filled with extinguishing liquid to put out fires, a bed clamp to stop the covers falling off children) or speculation (investment in a new printing process temporarily ruined him). A writing machine himself, all the time he piled up the pages, an addict of the word, a 3,000-a-day man. Like his compatriot Whistler (they met only once) he was an American in a hurry, striving to dash off long novels in months just as Whistler sought to dash off portraits "in one wet", but like the artist forced to scrub out and revise again and again.
Everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph, he wrote to a friend, but it was truer of himself. In his work there is that very American sense of an invading, superabundant reality forcing itself on to the page. The voices are not mulled in the author's head, they are in the room, as when an old black cook recounts the forced break-up of her family: "'Dis one lame,' or 'Dis one don't mount to much' . . . an' dey begin to sell my chil'en . . . an' I begin to cry; an' de man say, 'Shet up yo' dam blubberin',' an' hit me on de mouf wid his han'." His remarkable descriptions of nature are not word paintings to be admired through a Claude glass, serenely: they are stage sets - scenes for action. (The writing name he chose is itself thought to have come from his experiences as a Mississippi pilot: Mark Twain - two by six - being the 12-foot minimum draught necessary for the steamboats on which he worked.)
His talent for fantasy went along with a balancing gift of sanity, and he was sanest of all about religion. His father being a deist, he was spared a pietistic upbringing, and if he toyed briefly with the idea of preaching, it was more for the declamatory outlets it promised than from conviction. He was not anti-clerical: one of his closest friends was the Reverend Joe Twitchell, "a muscular Christian but not muscular enough to haul Sam back to the faith". Zealotry of any kind he hated. Upset when Huckleberry Finn was banned for profanity by the library board of Concord, Massachusetts, he would have been equally maddened to know that the same po-faced puritans, in 20th-century guise, were to ban it again - this time for racism - in the 1980s.
His political evolution was the opposite of the norm. As a young man he had no burning social convictions. He was an unthinking conservative, who once wrote that he was looking forward to summer "when niggers begin to sweat and look greasy", and his involvement in the civil war was confined to a couple of Dad's Army skirmishes against Union troops, from which he swiftly absquatulated (decamped) to the safer and more promising west, more interested in making his name and fortune than in making war for reasons of principle. In later life he came over all political, savaging the southern lynchers, backing strikers and siding with the anti-imperialists over the invasion of Cuba, though none of it prevented him from slugging brandy and chewing fat cigars on the yacht of his friend and financial saviour, Henry Huttleston Rogers, the director of Standard Oil.
Having never given social or international questions much thought, he did not allow his contradictions to bother him. He crucified Theodore Roosevelt over Cuba and dined with him at the White House, despised the pomposities and presumptions of Europe but was delighted with his honorary degree from Oxford, poncing about in his red gown whenever he could manufacture an occasion. His international travels and adventures mirrored America's unseemly irruption into the life of nations. The notion of a Connecticut Yankee at the court of King Arthur was nothing compared with the idea of Sam Clemens capering about the world. A tour of the Middle East with a boatload of American pilgrims was the preparation for his first big hit, Innocents Abroad, where the godly tourists were described as vandals and he was none too kind to the natives. (Hence his joke about the Second Coming: having seen the Middle East once, the Lord was unlikely to go again.) In Germany he struggled with the language ("Their words are so long they have perspective"), and he lorded it late in life in the Vienna of Klimt, Mahler and Freud, like a one-man American embassy. The British disapproved of the vulgarity and slang in his writing but, hypocritical as ever, could not resist him in person.
His public humour had the classic undertow of personal pathos. His money-grubbing was that of a man from a precarious background, haunted by the fear of expiring in the poorhouse, even when he was making a million a year from his writing in current dollars. Two of his three daughters died from tragic ailments, tragically slowly. He had a titanic temper, and without the remarkable stability of his marriage would have sunk more often and more deeply into depression than he did.
It is hard to think of a worthier biography than this mainly because there is nothing worthy about it. Powers tells the story with that uniquely American poise between the savvy and the cerebral, the literary and the populist, action and reflection. A stately, judicious rendering of Clemens's life would be an unnatural thing, and that is not what we get. ("His proto-rocker mojo kicked in," Powers writes of one of his lectures, "once he took the stage.") That Powers, a Pulitzer prizewinner, has produced such a resonant account confirms that reports of Mark Twain's death have indeed been exaggerated, and that, for all the occasional evidence to the contrary in contemporary America, his spirit is still alive.
George Walden's Why God Won't Save America: the crisis of the Puritan tradition will be published by Gibson Square Books this spring
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