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Andrew Levy
Let’s start with this fact: Mark Twain has over 2.1 million followers on Facebook. That is almost ten times as many as Herman Melville or the bestselling contemporary author Cheryl Strayed, and four times as many as the popular actress Jennifer Aniston (as of this writing). No other American author had a chain of banks named after him; none has as many restaurants, natural sites, or schools, let alone stamps, coins, and other memorabilia in his honor. In 2010, his Autobiography reached number one on the Amazon bestseller chart. When we talk about Mark Twain, we are talking about a resiliently iconic figure, the kind of person who, in their day, was instantly recognizable on a grand scale, regarded across the world as the representative of a certain country. Mao Zedong. Muhammad Ali. “I am not an American,” Twain wrote in his notebook in the 1890s. “I am the American” (quoted in Churchwell 2010).
But we live in the receding aftermath of that fame. It was over 100 years ago when likenesses of the man in the white suit were everywhere, when he lent his name to endorsements the way modern celebrities do now (cigars, clothing, scrapbooks, and so forth), when sports matches would stop as he entered the arena so crowds of thousands could cheer him. And it is two decades and more since the (likely) apogee of what Jonathan Arac calls Twain’s “hypercanonization” (Arac 1992), since, in particular, his most famous book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), was required reading for roughly three‐quarters of all American schoolchildren. That Twain endures might be due to the fact that his career conforms so well to the contours of modern celebrity: the translucent pseudonym, the twinned willingness to outrage and bemuse, the newspaper‐ready controversies and aphorisms, the art itself, so unyieldingly hard to pin down. Or he might endure because he planned it that way: he instructed his estate to hold that Autobiography for 100 years, after all. At the same time, the core achievements of his literary career are now clearly more tempest‐tossed than canonical. As a 2011 controversy over a NewSouth Books edition of Huck Finn that replaced the “n‐word” with the word “slave” indicates, the debate over whether Twain was a liberator of language and politics (the “Lincoln of our literature,” as Howells [1910: 101] famously wrote) or the vehicle with which later generations would import the racism of a previous time into the present is provocative enough to trend to the top of Twitter. But it may be too provocative to qualify its subject for a secure cornerstone in the cultural canon of an increasingly multiracial society.
In this context, the question of “Mark Twain and the idea of American identity” contains two hiccups: first, whether that link, taken for granted as much with him as with other hypercanonical American figures like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, ought to be interrogated rather than accepted; and, second, whether the terms of Twain’s “American‐ness” have ever allowed us a clean glimpse of that frantic multipolar figure, or the really extraordinary role he played in the cultural history of the world’s twentieth century. American presidents from William Howard Taft to Ronald Reagan wrote (or had ghostwritten for them) adoring tributes. Harry Truman was likened to a Twain character; Robert Kennedy called Lyndon Johnson “Huckleberry Capone” (Shesol 1997: 363). But Benito Mussolini too said that Huck Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) were his favorite books (Clemens 1934: 3), and translations of both circulated in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, where no less than 90 translations of Huck Finn have been published since the end of the Cultural Revolution. The fact that Twain’s writings have traveled the globe should remind us that he, too, traveled the globe in search of his muse and his morals. His celebrity in the United States may have revolved around what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the “chronicles of buoyant boyhood” (quoted in Hearn 2001: cxxx–cxxxviii), the stories of antebellum Missouri and Tom and Huck’s seriocomic adolescences there. But in China he is more famous for having said, in 1900, during the anti‐foreign Boxer Uprising, “I am a Boxer” (Lai‐Henderson 2015: 11), an unequivocal statement of defiance to Western powers and support for a rebellion 6000 miles away in which he could have no possible interest except love of liberty.
The irony of the specific moment in Twain studies, then, is this: that releasing him from the straitjacketed terms of his twentieth‐century fame may cost him much of that fame, but it also allows readers to observe a more complicated figure better suited to the twenty‐first century than we might otherwise have seen. Huck Finn is still widely read, but has been moved from required classes into elective ones; it is highly unlikely that American politicians in the future will cite Twain nearly as much as they did in the past. And individuals in the Twain culture industry fret that their audience (including those millions on Facebook) are aging and are not being replaced by a younger generation. In breaking with the terms that guided Twain’s celebrity in the past century, however, the work of scholars over the last two decades has also broken Twain away from his image as a singer of bucolic (and white, and male) childhood, and as patron saint of the political progressivism that was so successful in the late middle part of the last century, but finds its relevance justifiably tested today. The portrait of Twain emerging in the early years of the twenty‐first century is that of a cosmopolite, who knew cities as well as he knew farms, and who spent more of his adult life in Germany than in Missouri. He was not merely a self‐consciously national cultural figure, but a powerful dissenter against Western imperial aspirations across the globe. He wasn’t even “just” a writer, but a savant of verbal forms, not just a failed inventor and investor in failed inventions, but a student of history who approached the late Victorian economy and its popular culture with a fervid savvy that explains, as much as anything, his endurance as an icon in the century that followed. He was not just the provider of tales of “buoyant boyhood,” but a complicated thinker on matters of American youth and how to raise them. And lastly, he remains an important, even fixated thinker/comedian on race matters. As scholars have broken away from the Huck‐centric context around which so much canonization and controversy has revolved, however, and explored race instead in other corners of his oeuvre, they have recovered a vision far more capacious and troubled than that which launched a thousand lesson plans for Huck Finn in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. To ask if Mark Twain exemplifies the idea of American identity, in other words, we don’t just ask if he was/is a suitable representative of a national consciousness; we ask what that national consciousness is, whether and how it is changing, and whether or not we even have one, or ever had one, sufficiently unified to justify such terms of debate.
The link between Twain and the idea of America is a complicated one, but its constituent parts do overlap. Let’s start with the name. “Mark Twain,” as I say it, and as you hear it, is an already overdetermined idea, an aura, a guarantee of a certain literary, comedic, or political experience. “Mark Twain” was tightly protected during the last years of his life – Samuel L. Clemens considered copyright protection a vital issue, testifying before Congress on different occasions (including the one where, in 1906, he first wore that famous white suit). And “Mark Twain” was tightly protected after his death by a number of sources, including Twain’s surviving daughter, Clara; his first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine; and the rules of his own literary will, which shielded specific, controversial works for decades. For tens of millions, Twain remains easily, instantaneously linked to the “children’s classics” that occupied his mid‐career – Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, the key Missouri texts, but also the polite, iconic Prince and the Pauper (1881), and even the time‐traveling, American‐exceptionalizing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). But he is recognized, too, for the self‐conscious, earthy, densely ironic non‐fictions, novels, and short stories that made his Victorian reputation, their titles – The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), Life on the Mississippi (1883), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900), and so on – as echoic within the national memory as middle‐of‐paragraph phrases from the Declaration of Independence or the names of old pop hits. There are fractures in his portrait, of course: canonical biographies like Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, first published in 1966, portray a divided personality, and numerous other critics still sustain the Twain‐as‐tortured‐soul (or squanderer‐of‐his‐talents, or heartbroken‐and‐bitter‐at‐life’s‐end, or bad‐investor) image largely inaugurated by Van Wyck Brooks in 1920 in The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Subsumed by Twain’s titanic self‐deprecation and irony, however, such revisionisms only seem to add to his aura. He remains highly photogenic, easily recognizable, easy to convert to adjectives (“feisty, cantankerous,” to quote Sarah Churchwell [2010]), easy to hear even without the existence of recordings of his voice: a deadpan twang, made familiar through the work of numerous imitators, including, most famously, Hal Holbrook in his one‐man play, Mark Twain Tonight.
Like other key “Americans” such as Franklin or Lincoln, “Mark Twain” is highly quotable (even receiving credit for sayings he possibly did not say). Like Franklin, Lincoln, or Ali, “Mark Twain” is linked to social disorder, verbal fecundity, to homegrown humor, and to the liberation of vernacular language and political ideas. And like Franklin, Lincoln, or Ali, Twain supplied the means through which a certain kind of “good bad boy,” a kind of reckless but “harmless” and perhaps even politically healthy masculinity was also celebrated. It is no surprise that so many American politicians in the twentieth century regarded him as a key influence: Huck and Tom taught millions of American children that a bit of lying and corruption and scene‐stealing was how business, even progressive business, gets done in America. But what divided Twain from most politicians was also what divided Franklin, Lincoln, and Ali from other national representatives: like those rare few, Twain could sustain a pro‐American and anti‐American position at the same time, could seem to embody American values that critiqued American norms. That he could say “I am the American” and “I am a Boxer” in the same half‐decade was, and is, part of the branded Mark Twain experience, as much as Muhammad Ali’s simultaneous ownership of the heavyweight boxing crown and refusal to fight in Vietnam was, and is, part of his.
That brand is encoded in the name itself: “Mark Twain,” as is well known, was Mississippi River jargon for 12 feet of water, a little too shallow to be safe. But it was shouted out as the water deepened, too: in other words, “Mark Twain” was what you also heard when you were being reassured that you were almost out of danger (Cox 1966: 23). As an authorial promise, “Mark Twain” implied that its consumer ought to be uncomfortable (“The Trouble Begins at Eight,” posters for Twain’s performances often promised), but also that the danger might be over – that “Mark Twain” was engaged in the act of tamping down the danger even as he manifested it. A quick glance at some of his most famous aphorisms, which fill many, many Internet pages, provides a rough outline of how his “brand” represents this kind of American sensibility, if not an actual politics. Like many quotable Americans, he is credited for celebrating “thinking for oneself” (“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will”), self‐conscious independence (“Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform”), self‐awareness (“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval”), and truthfulness (“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything”). He also represents, perhaps more than any other figure, faith in comedy as a political agent (“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand”), commitment to both naturalness and precision in language (“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug”), and, ironically, a winking endorsement of deceit (“First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure”). In addition, he also speaks for an acid view of politics (“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself”), religion (“Heaven for climate, Hell for society”), and the “human race” itself, a phrase that recurs in any list of his most famous quotations: “I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That’s bad enough for me.” That this mixture succeeds is, in part, because of Twain’s extraordinary verbal control and comic timing (“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”), self‐deprecation (“The human race is a race of cowards, and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner”), and pleasing micro‐subversions (“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow”). The net effect of reading a list of Twain quotations, like reading his novels, stories, or works of non‐fiction, is contrast, surprise, and release, as one’s faith in an American system based on democracy, capitalism, and piety is both formed and malformed line by line, quote by quote, even word by word and pause by pause.And, as this catalogue suggests, Twain’s larger writings also provide ample wiggle room for many political and cultural uses – not every use, but a surprisingly wide and contradictory spectrum. Howells’s alliterative and glib link between Lincoln, Twain, and the matter of American language is nationalizing and classroom‐friendly: generations of writers, from the time T.S. Eliot claimed that Twain “purified the dialect of the tribe” (Eliot 1965: 54) to Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s revolutionary exegesis of Twain’s affinity for African American language in Was Huck Black? (1993), have positioned Twain as the patron saint of English as it is actually spoken by everyday people. That the Kennedy Center issues every year an award named the Mark Twain Prize to a distinguished humorist similarly implies a nationalization of regard: the federal government views him as its foundational comedian (despite, or perhaps because of, those wisecracks about Congress). That Ken Burns made a PBS documentary about him implies Twain’s membership in a user‐friendly, left‐leaning pantheon of the distinctly American, alongside Burns’s other subjects: jazz, baseball, the Civil War, the Roosevelts. As Arac has noted, Huck Finn’s omnipresence in the decades after World War II had much to do with an identification of Huck himself with white liberalism, and the “bond” between Huck and Jim with interracial outreach during the Civil Rights era. This identification, this implicit belief that what Huck did was right on race, was sufficiently consensual that it reached past men and women on the left side of the political spectrum to the likes of Ronald Reagan himself, who editorialized in the Washington Post that “Huck works hard to keep Jim free, and in the end he succeeds” (quoted in Arac 1997: 105).
Perhaps most vividly, a century‐long procession of comics and abridged editions, library and educational practices, and radio, television, and theatrical plays have linked Twain to a vision of childhood regarded as national: it is no problem to find references to Huck Finn as “America’s child” (Levy 2014: 206). Twain’s vision of childhood, however, is wildly fluid: it seems reactionary in a way designed to please individuals who believe America’s best days are behind us, yet positions children at the head of a counterculture more attuned to contemporary mores. It locates “paradise” for children (Twain’s fictional name for Hannibal, “St. Petersburg,” translates roughly to “Heaven”) in the past, in the “country,” in a premodern age and a social order where blacks and women can, at best, test their liberties. But it commends autonomy for children in a way that modern academic educational theorists might readily endorse, and which could scarcely be realized without also shaking to its foundations the rest of a social order based on race, class, and gender distinctions.
In the last two decades, however, scholars and writers (Twain studies sustains many trade interventions, and amateur ones, as well as scholarly) have resisted the more restrictive canons that have shaped Twain’s reputation, even sustained it. In essence, modern scholars have led a thorough and multivalent decentering: away from Hannibal and the Mississippi, away from the middle years of Twain’s career (Huck Finn was published in 1884, almost exactly halfway between his first national success, and his death in 1910), away from the rustic, domestic, and antebellum, and away from the markers that imply he was dealing with something immanently “central” in American life. For this version of Twain, we can begin to construct a different silhouette. We can regard that branded name as Victorian audiences understood it, as deliriously unstable: newspaper reviews of his lectures sometimes called him both Clemens and Twain in the same sentence, enjoying that he offered himself as neither one person nor more than one. In this context, one might think of Madonna, Lady Gaga, or any other modern performer who seems to be both puppet and puppeteer, who arranges glimpses of a real name, yet refuses to give us clear boundaries between what is real and what isn’t, what is meant and what is not. Twain was like that: his Autobiography (2010, 2013, 2015), beautifully edited by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, is self‐consciously discontinuous and intertextual, an ahead‐of‐its‐time rebellion against the notion that his, or perhaps anyone’s, life could best be told in a unitary and linear narrative.Likewise, we might loosen ourselves from the grip of that comforting “twang.” The recent work of scholars looking at Twain in performance, ranging from Randall Knoper’s Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (1995), to the fine descriptions of Twain on stage found in Ron Powers’ Mark Twain: A Life (2005), to the resources provided by Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia on the “Mark Twain in His Times” website, portray a semiotic delirium comprised of unearthly deadpans, brutally long and perfectly timed pauses, and pitch‐perfect imitations. He stomped and stared, and wanted to make you laugh until you lost control and, as any reader of his late essay “How to Tell a Story” (1905) knows, he wanted to scare you a lot. Sir Henry Irving, a prominent actor of the Victorian age, told Twain that he missed his calling choosing writing over acting (Knoper 1995: 10). Theater reviewers from the time commonly observed that “Every modulation of his voice” revealed some meaning “new and unsuspected […] in writings that may have been read over a dozen times” (Anonymous 1884: 2). And he ruled the newspapers, which he claimed to disdain: a poll by the Critic in 1884 listed him as only the fourteenth most significant American author, but none of the 13 authors before him (ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes to George Washington Cable) filled an opera house or front‐page feature piece like he did (Budd 1983: 95). In other words, what we read from Twain now is a vestige, a shorthand of what Victorian audiences recognized and received: a multimedia piece of performance art, an event as much as a text.
We can next begin to adjust Twain’s geography: where he went, where he lived, what he wrote about, and why it mattered. In fact, Twain’s Mississippi, in the 1840s, was not “central” at all – it was a frontier, an edge. And he left his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, as soon as he could, at the age of 17, and almost never returned for the rest of his life. He went immediately to large, American metropolises known for their multicultural populations, places like New York or New Orleans, where, as his early letters suggest, the prejudices of his childhood were laid bare and tested. After his career as a riverboat pilot was brought to an end by the outbreak of the Civil War, he traveled to Nevada, where he became a newspaperman and took the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863. His national celebrity came shortly after, with his humorous account of an organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad, a book self‐consciously about the contrast between an American sensibility and international stimuli. On his first headline‐making lecture series, “The American Vandal Abroad” tour of 1868 and 1869, he told audiences that “You never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow‐minded, self‐conceited almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place ever since he was born” (Fatout 2006: 35–36). His subsequent marriage to Olivia Langdon placed him within the familial line of northerners and abolitionists. He wrote most of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on a hillside overlooking Elmira, New York; he and Olivia raised their children in so many Europeans cities that they learned to read German before English; he crossed the Atlantic numerous times, and lectured across Africa, Asia, and Australia. And he spent the last years of his life living in an apartment in New York City and house in nearby Connecticut. When combined with the extraordinary reach of his “work” – the early years spent as everything from printer to riverboat pilot to miner to congressional secretary to journalist, the late years spent inventing, lecturing, writing, campaigning, befriending men like Henry Rogers, the Standard Oil magnate, and women like the deaf‐blind author and activist Helen Keller – it becomes common sense that Twain really wasn’t constructing a nostalgic “home” or “center” to which Americans could return via his books, but a model of the American as decentered whirlwind.
For this Twain, we might credibly add this quote, from Following the Equator (1897), to his list of widely known aphorisms: “I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent” (Twain 1996a: 710). Or this, from the same book, on Cecil Rhodes, the British entrepreneur who led the European colonization of much of southern Africa: “I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake” (Twain 1996a: 710). The former, with its cautiously tortured grammar, still implies anything but the spirit of American exceptionalism, and anything but the earthbound attachment for American soil for which he is often celebrated. And the latter, with, or despite its initial fake‐out, still conveys unquestioned contempt for a powerful political figure whom many in the Western world once admired. As Selina Lai‐Henderson notes in Mark Twain in China, Twain secured large readerships in one‐party countries that saw themselves as antipodes to American power precisely because of the ease with which his writings can be perceived as anti‐Western and particularly anti‐American: a striking point of cultural dissonance for anyone collecting his folksy memorabilia (Lai‐Henderson 2015: 89). Simultaneously, his celebrations of the “angels” elsewhere, and his disdain for authoritarian and imperialist practices writ small or large, made him an inspiring figure for dissidents like Lao She, who, in an essay excerpted in Fishkin’s Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (which, with selections from Theodor Herzl, José Martí, and Kenzaburo Oe, makes a strong omnibus case for Twain’s international reach), celebrated his “sympathy for the anti‐colonialist Asian and African people” (Fishkin 2010: 284).
Of course, there is also Mussolini; there is the czarina of Russia, who, one journalist noticed, had a copy of Huck Finn in her boudoir (Kaplan 1983: 325). Or Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, or countless others, all subtle reminders of how the nationalization of Mark Twain undervalues how much he engaged in, and was absorbed into, a global discourse about race and power and youth, and how much he played the joker there, too. Twain and Huck Finn in particular may represent some distinctly American language and distinctly American themes, but Soviet translators had no problem swapping the Volga for the Mississippi, Chinese translators found substitutes for the “n‐word”; audiences in Japan, measured in the tens of millions, enjoyed lengthy anime productions of both Huck and Tom (Ishihara 2005: 109). Simultaneously, the effacement of these international components of Twain’s career from the nationalizing profile of his canonization effaces so much more: it effaces him as a potent and partisan political figure, drawing attention, instead, to the more blandly popular aspects of his political vision, and citing his “cowardice” (with his own sanction to do so, admittedly) when what he actually wrote or said doesn’t fit contemporary political agendas. In fact, he was less cowardly than alternately brave or self‐interested – but he could be brave, and ignoring the international reach of his words helps us forget that. As observers have noted, it is remarkable how completely his anti‐imperialist writings disappeared from public view, until Jim Zwick’s 1992 groundbreaking collection Weapons of Satire. In those writings, we are reminded that Twain took many political risks during the last decades of his life, publishing satire after satire against the American occupation in the Philippines and Cuba, the army’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques (including, chillingly, the technique familiar to twenty‐first‐century Americans as waterboarding), its political leadership (Teddy Roosevelt wanted to “skin Twain alive” [McFarland 2012: 424]), and the genocide in the Belgian Congo. That reminded Twain so much of American slavery that no modern reader of his late‐career satire King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905) could possibly accuse him of being a nostalgia artist, or an artist whose political vision stopped at the American shoreline.1
Just as crucially, in deconstructing Twain’s geography, we deconstruct the themes and ideas that guide his uses for a domestic audience. As its title implies, Ben Tarnoff’s The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Invented American Literature (2014) privileges northern California in the 1860s as the locus of Twain’s literary development, a strategic turn that, like Ann M. Ryan and Joseph B. McCullough’s collection Cosmopolitan Twain (2008), sees Twain’s responses to cities as crucial. Rather than seeing a figure whose feelings on race developed exclusively in the Hannibal context, as a child in response to the deep binary of slavery, we also see the “dandy” of Knoper’s Acting Naturally, who prowled bars in New York for “genuine” African American music, as young white men affected by the “charisma” of blackness would in the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and the era of hip‐hop. Given Twain’s role in the national debate about race – and more cogently, given the fact that one of Huck Finn’s main uses in American classrooms in the late twentieth century was as the “race book,” the book about slavery, in the years before teachers and school boards discovered Frederick Douglass and others – this shift has national repercussions. At the very least, it balances the image of Twain as an ethicist and stylist who believed that contact with nature was the only key to moral development, when he also learned much in crowds, and not always American crowds. At the very most, it redraws the terms of Twain’s national resonance: rather than seeing an adult repudiating the racism of his youth, a kind of blandly pleasing parable of moral progress, we see a white figure of some discernment moving through different phases of constructing self‐satisfying images of “blackness,” a more cynical but more accurate reflection of the way justice‐for‐all works as a promise in reality, and a more accurate plot description for Huck Finn than Ronald Reagan’s as well.
Some of the more valuable recent work on Huck Finn has addressed these shifts compellingly: from Toni Morrison’s widely reprinted “This Amazing, Troubling Book” (1996/1999), which reflects on Twain’s deep, focused (and morally uncertain) portrait of the idea of “blackness,” to Ishmael Reed, who in “Mark Twain’s Hairball” celebrates Twain’s map of the “patterns” that govern American race relations on crucial (and deeply contemporary) matters like invisibility and incarceration (Reed 2009: 380). In fact, the polyphony of voices weighing in on race and Huck Finn alone reminds us that how we use Twain is the issue at hand, that his relationship to “American identity” is most of the debate. Critical texts that rehabilitate Huck Finn in innovative ways, like Jocelyn Chadwick‐Joshua’s The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (1998), which argues that Jim, the slave, is the book’s real hero, and ones that condemn it, like Sharon E. Rush’s Huck Finn’s “Hidden” Lessons: Teaching and Learning Across the Color Line (2006), which argues that teaching Huck Finn violates the constitutional right of equal protection to African American public school students, do the same cultural work: they decenter the idea that either Huck or Twain is the white savior at the heart of the national narrative on race. Like the many scholars who have focused recently on Twain’s Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), a novel more open than Huck Finn to the notion that race is a perverse cultural construction, such critics, whether pro or con Twain, also detach him and his novels from a concept hugely fundamental to his nationalization: that his work posits a happy and accessible ending to the civil rights struggle, or at least tries to.
As other scholars work in other areas of Twain’s life and work, however, even these revisions to his reputation, as significant as they may be, tell only part of the story. Attention to early stages of Twain’s career, his California years particularly, shares a common bond with attention to later stages of his career, when he became engaged with anti‐imperialist issues: they reveal how much Twain’s early exposure to racism against Chinese immigrants shaped his vision of the structural discrimination against all persons of color in Victorian society, both domestically and globally. What we have regarded as binary was to Twain, in fact, multiple and intersectional: scholars like Lai‐Henderson (2015), Darren Chiang‐Schultheiss (2006), and Hsuan L. Hsu (2013) have catalyzed a debate that compels us to look at a different set of Twain texts, like the early sketch “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” (1870), his ironic defense of a youth arrested for stoning Chinese immigrants in San Francisco; or his late anti‐imperialist piece “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901). When combined with other components of Twain’s work – minor but not disregarded writings about Jews, Native Americans, and non‐English language and translation issues – one sees how much Twain engaged, sometimes with great vision and sometimes with small, the idea of a multicultural society inspired by the vast and diverse immigration patterns of the Victorian era.
Similarly, the work of scholars such as Eric Lott (1995), Henry B. Wonham (2004), and Sharon D. McCoy (2009) on racial caricature has uncloseted the fact that Twain built his portraits of disenfranchised others from a rich, confusing – and yet truly, quintessentially American – amalgam of stock fantasy and lived experience. Those authors ranging from Eliot to Fishkin were right, of course: Twain was extraordinary on the matter of the American voice, especially the voices of the marginalized. He was actually a founding member of the American Folklore Society, filled his journals with overheard conversations, rehearsed imitations like one imagines the gifted actor Meryl Streep does: Helen Keller, who “listened” to people by putting her hands on their necks as they spoke, said that Twain’s throat as he mimicked did things no one else’s did (Shelden 2010: 312–316). But a key component of Twain’s ideology was his faith in the political power of pop culture, in “low” music and theater, and that faith both reinforced and undermined his intense, sometimes fetishistic empathy for disenfranchised men and women. To really dwell upon Twain’s late‐in‐life reminiscences of the minstrel shows of his youth, for instance, is to grapple with the absolutely extraordinary way that he could express both liberatory and repressive sentiment in the same handful of words – and just how much faith and expertise he put into strategies of racial mimicry that commingled exploitation and empathy in a manner characteristic of postwar cultural capitalism, making it non‐coincidental that national regard for Huck Finn might rise alongside the careers of Elvis Presley or the Rolling Stones.
Lastly, other scholars – from the social sciences, especially – have offered dramatic revisions to what has been the one component of Twain’s celebrity most resistant to interpretation: his vision of children. It only takes a slight twist of the lens that remains focused on certain major Twain works to see how much, and for how long, he was deeply interested in the political lives of children: a contemporary reader of the Prince and the Pauper might more readily note its persistent and uneasy portrayals of child abuse, and see in its title not a reference to class inversion, but to an alliance among children rich and poor to create (as is the case at novel’s end) a society more compassionate to its most vulnerable. Likewise, the pyrotechnic time‐travel (itself cutting edge) of Connecticut Yankee, to that same reader, only thinly conceals a novel fixated on how to raise children in new and bold ways that have more to do with rebelling against legacies of ignorance and abuse than preserving old‐fashioned bucolic idylls. There are still summer camps, wilderness retreats, and bluegrass festivals named after Huck or Tom; there are still editorial and promotional writers for whom either boy’s name remains shorthand for a liberated youth, out in nature, filled with “adventure.” But there are also physicians, psychologists, social workers, and journalists who have recognized in efforts to “sivilize” Tom and Huck analogies to mental health regimens that guide the lives of millions of modern children – even recognizing, in cases like David Nylund’s Treating Huckleberry Finn (2000), that Twain’s iconic children, were they alive today, might well be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Similarly, other social scientists have recognized in Huck an icon, not of the carefree child, but of the vulnerable one. In books like James Garbarino’s Lost Boys (1999), the fact that Huck exhibits the traits of what modern social workers would recognize as a depressed child, an abused child, the child of an alcoholic, or a child likely to do jail time in adulthood, carries a potent neo‐mythic resonance: how can “America’s child” be so at risk, and why didn’t we notice?
“We” didn’t notice, perhaps, because there was no “we” to notice – no cohesive American community carefully operating a canon‐making identity, just an ad hoc historical process where certain constituencies spoke loudly and sometimes with their best selves, while certain others did not speak at all, or in a whisper. Anthropologists have long had a name for a figure like Twain, of course: the trickster, the culture hero who represents the necessarily unsteady triumph of creativity over conventional morality. And Twain, who adored the Brer Rabbit stories as a youth, felt tricksterism like an instinct, and tricksterdom like a birthright. He was an amazingly enclosed system: he scripted his own creativity, criticism, promotion, and canonization, and the more one looks at him, the more one reads him, the more one sees a hectic mess, but a special kind of mess, one that worked, that completed, and still completes, a cultural process from beginning to end. Not only did he say that he was “the American,” but in Life on the Mississippi (1883) he also reported (with some pride) the assessment of a steamboat pilot who sized him up and said, “Taking you by and large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before” (Twain 1996b: 108). It is hard not to admire the figure who put that down on paper for the world to see – and equally hard not to see in him a metonym for a nation that, too, looks from certain angles like a beacon for the world and from others like a puzzling, scandalous, and yet colossally vibrant exercise in self‐interest.
It has been an error, a national error, to employ Twain to represent conventional morality and happy endings, however – a fact that critics of his canonization, compelled to point out the obvious places where Twain doesn’t represent all Americans, recognize with pained clarity. There is no way that nationalizing Twain hasn’t left bruises, inflicted pain, from the numerous black readers of Huck Finn, for instance, who have described intense humiliation in the middle or upper school classrooms where that book was taught, to the white southerners theoretically represented by the notorious anti‐communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, who proposed banning Huck Finn to protect them from embarrassment. Conversely, there is no way that nationalizing Twain hasn’t hurt his own reputation as well, to the extent that many of the canonical failures ascribed to him – inspired by his own words, which could be devoutly self‐deprecating – are essential components of such a reputation, too. Even from a hundred years’ distance, he looks fiery and rough‐edged – but we have sanded down his rough edges, the bad ones and the good, to make him visible even on those terms.
In the end, he was a brilliantly synthetic writer, open‐minded, almost to the point of distraction, as interested in the stories and language he salvaged (or stole) as the ones he composed – a realist and a fantasist, a keen empath and exploiter, a hungry, restless traveler who remembered his childhood with such pitch‐perfect clarity that he made millions remember it, too. Among major American literary figures, he was the best listener: he may well have been the best thief, or, at least, the best sampler, and the best actor, too. He was no nostalgist: if anything, as Ishmael Reed implies, he was ultimately much more worried that the worst aspects of the past repeated themselves than that the best aspects were fading away. In the middle of his career, he was ambivalent and opportunistic, and we have celebrated that as moral clarity and courage; nearer the end of his life, he achieved moral clarity and courage, and in return for that we canonized that stage of his life as his “bitter” period (a notion that authors like Karen Lystra [2004] and Michael Shelden have tried to erase). If such a figure represents America, or the idea of it, he represents our highs and our lows, but with more self‐awareness, more contexts, more civic unforgivables, but also more truly transcendent moments “we” may not forgive for less honorable motives. He did not promise happy endings, or happy pasts, though: go find a picture of him, right now, and look at that expression, and try to tell yourself otherwise. I’ll wait. He looks like he is almost about to grin; or maybe wink, let you in on the conspiracy, remind you what a fine trick being American is. But he isn’t going to do that. He isn’t ever going to do that.
References
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (TRAVEL WRITING); CHAPTER 20 (LOCAL COLOR AND THE RISE OF REGIONALISM); CHAPTER 22 (REALISM FROM WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS TO EDITH WHARTON).
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