Where the Twains meet: America's novelist, prophet, cynic, philosopher, and romantic

In 1880, Mark Twain earned, in today's dollars, nearly $5 million as a writer and stand-up comic. At the height of his popularity, he lived high on the hog. His swank Hart-ford home, sporting the city's first telephone, was stuffed with expensive bric-a-brac, its library adorned with metal leaf designed by Tiffany and Co. Twain craved adulation, milked every scrap of his life for profit, alternated between hits and flops, abused his friends, and flew into rages at publishers, patrons, and fans.

He was, in other words, a celebrity.

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Indeed, argues Ron Powers in his rollicking new account of how the man born Samuel Clemens became the most recognizable figure of his era, Mark Twain was the first "rock star." Drawing on an array of sources, including newly available letters, Powers presents a portrait of Twain as engaging and detailed as we are ever likely to have, a worthy successor to the classic biography by Justin Kaplan, now 40 years in the past.

Twain was born to write. He filled up scores of notebooks and penned, by some estimates, upwards of 100,000 letters, including 184 in courtship of his wife, Olivia Langdon. Whether in the golden evocation of his Tom Sawyer-like childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, or the vituperation of his harshest satire, he was capable of beautiful, timeless craftsmanship.

By the same token, much of his work was slapdash, and he was also a born huckster, as well known for his rambunctious stage performances and self-promotion as for his books. He was besieged by total strangers for editorial and financial assistance. (In reply to one woman's plea for money he advised that she commit suicide.) He worked hard to out-swindle those he accused of swindling him, poured money into crackpot schemes (most famously the ill-fated Paige Typesetting machine), and avoided total ruin only through the hard love of patient counselors. In a later era, he would have recognized the fortune to be made in sneakers, theme parks, and reality TV.

Twain forecast the contours of our own age because, in his outsized personality and homespun witticisms, half-sincere and half-satiric, he was thoroughly American. He seemed to arise in response to Walt Whitman's call, in Leaves of Grass, for a vernacular voice rough-hewn and energetic enough to embrace the great poem of the United States.

Like Whitman, Twain celebrated American cultural independence and took a skeptic's measure of democracy. His life from 1835 to 1910--he arrived with Haley's Comet and would go out with it, he accurately quipped--encompassed the nation's maturation as a global military and economic power, along with its failure to deliver on the promise of black emancipation. Along the East-West axis of manifest destiny and the North-South axis of the Mississippi River, the lifeline between slavery and freedom, Twain's imaginative geography spanned the country whose story he told.

Perhaps, as his mentor William Dean Howells put it, Twain is the "Lincoln of our literature." But the populist spirit and linguistic facility he shared with the president may also have served, in Twain's case, to repress his guilt about sitting out the Civil War. After deserting the Missouri State Guard--he "knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating," he later wrote in "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed"--Twain followed his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory, where he exchanged his early career as a steamboat pilot for prospecting, gambling, carousing, and setting up as a newspaper writer and charismatic raconteur.

With one foot in the salon and the other in the saloon, as Powers describes his rise to fame in bohemian San Francisco, Twain mastered the art of releasing his punch-line, the "snapper," at just the right moment--and, when things were not going well, the art of the unfunny joke that, by virtue of its failure, became funny (his gift to later comedians such as Johnny Carson). By the time he delivered his notorious insults of the aged luminaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, gathered for John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday dinner in 1877--the first celebrity roast, Powers observes--Twain had breached stuffy New England culture and raised yarn-spinning, written as well as spoken, to a complex art.

Capitalizing upon the middlebrow literacy spread by the rapid multiplication of newspapers and book sales by subscription, Twain revolutionized one genre after another. On stage, he quickly eclipsed Artemus Ward, the most popular wit of the day. In print, he surpassed the backwoods sketches of Sut Lovingood, then the frontier regionalism of Bret Harte, then the travel writing of Bayard Taylor, and then the boy's adventure books of Horatio Alger. He even tried his hand at pornography in the mock-Elizabethan language of 1601, a lark intended only for his friends.

Although his early books were composed largely from his newspaper travel "letters"--collected, padded, reshaped, honed, and padded some more (people wanted their money's worth in subscription books)--their true subject was Mark Twain himself, and irreverence was the rule. Whereas writers from Washington Irving to Henry James studied the Old World to test American exceptionalism, Twain slashed and burned his way through monarchies and antiquities with Yankee braggadocio. In The Innocents Abroad, based on his tour of Europe and the Holy Land, as well as its spin-off lecture, "The American Vandal Abroad," Twain's desecration of civilizations past, whether in literally hacking off souvenirs or in figurative scorn, announced the arrival of the tourist as ugly American.

But something other than philistinism was at work. As though governed by what Edgar Allan Poe called the "imp of the perverse," Twain early on displayed an antic, risk-taking impulse. In one newspaper sketch, as a means of exposing stock fraud in Nevada, he retailed a bloodsoaked hoax about the murder of his wife and seven children by a man who had been duped; in another, he claimed that the proceeds from a Carson City fundraiser were being diverted to a "Miscegenation Society" back east. Although Twain learned (and was forced) to censor himself, he never outgrew a penchant for thumbing his nose at propriety, so that mockery intended to draw a lesson frequently contended with contrary effects.

Twain's comedy, as Howells intuited, was an extension of his volatility, which in turn stemmed from roiling subcurrents of bitterness and anger. Rather than standing in the way of more serious artistry, Powers rightly argues, this paradox formed the essence of Twain's liberating genius, even as it left him exposed to charges, during his lifetime and all the more so a century later, that his work was compromised by vulgarity or political incorrectness.

Powers eschews psychobiography and, not without reason, belittles academic trends that have labored to explain (and often condemn) Twain by all manner of special pleading--the racist Twain, the closeted Twain, the post-colonialist-but-secretly-neo-colonialist Twain, and so forth. Some readers, however, will wish that Powers had pushed harder on the bedeviling force that underlay Twain's preoccupation with doubles, twins, and what he called his "dream self," the haunting alter ego he wrote into parables such as "A Mystery" in which, like Philip Roth in Operation Shylock, he is plagued by a dissolute impostor named Mark Twain, or "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," in which he confesses to murdering his own conscience.

Nowhere was such doubleness of purpose more evident than in Twain's treatment of race. Excepting his jaundiced views of American Indians, Twain was no racist--just the reverse. He quietly financed the education of a black man attending Yale. He fulminated against racial vigilantism in a late essay entitled "The United States of Lyncherdom." And whether or not one is persuaded by recent arguments that Huck Finn's voice was modeled on that of a 10-year-old black boy Twain had sketched in 1874--as Powers reminds us, colloquial American language was already deeply inflected by African-American speech, certainly in the South--he wrote black dialect with loving care.

At the same time, Twain was not above employing "darky" humor in public and racially charged jokes in private. (Of Howells's favorable review of Roughing It, Twain remarked, "I am as uplifted & reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto.") This habit grew from Twain's instinct to go for the jugular, but it was also the means by which he captured the central drama of post-Reconstruction history.

Powers provides an especially good account of the on-again, off-again composition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its intersection with Twain's nostalgic 1882 return to the Mississippi, which released him from a logjam in his novel's plot. Although he calls this the most exhilarating episode of Twain's life, Powers's treatment of both the trip and its resulting travelogue, Life on the Mississippi, is oddly truncated. Likewise, his analysis of Twain's masterpiece, while filled with sharply noticed details, is quite conventional. On the one hand, Powers recognizes that Huck's humbling of himself to Jim and his decision to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to slavery were something stunning and new in the national literature. On the other, he succumbs to the view that the concluding chapters, in which Huck and Tom Sawyer subject Jim to all kinds of prankish torments before revealing that he has already been set free by his dying owner, constitute a disabling flaw.

From T.S. Eliot onward, this problem has been endlessly debated but never solved, Powers frets. But the fact is that it was not meant to be solved. Huckleberry Finn is not great "despite" these chapters; and though it might be too much to say it is great "because of" them, the problem of setting a free man free, an abiding moral imperative for the nation and the novel alike (as Twain conceived it), has gotten lost in the opprobrium visited upon him by a generation of prim inquisitors.

A few years ago the novelist Jane Smiley weighed in. Having determined that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has "little to offer in the way of greatness," and that the novel's defenders, like the "villain" Twain, are prisoners of the white man's canon, Smiley advised reading Uncle Tom's Cabin instead. (So intimate was her engagement of Twain that Smiley, without its being noticed by her editors at Harper's, consistently misidentified the novel as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.) Now, Harriet Beecher Stowe's polemic has many merits, but it is hardly subtle. All black and white, so to speak, and driven by emotional extortion, Uncle Tom's Cabin is well suited to the age of racial grievance and the triumph of "feeling" as a cardinal aesthetic virtue--all the things Huckleberry Finn is not.

"No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it," Ralph Ellison argued in 1970. "For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence, but Jim's condition as American and Huck's commitment to freedom are at the moral center of the novel." Like fellow black writers Toni Morrison, David Bradley, and Walter Mosely, among others, and unlike Jane Smiley, Ellison was not persuaded that Twain's use of the word "nigger" provides grounds for banning the book, or that contemporary African Americans are incapable of coming to terms with the normative prejudice of another era.

More to the point, these readers have understood that Huck's ethical victory is undermined by Tom's shenanigans for the same reason that the black rights guaranteed by the Civil War Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 were undermined by the refusal of legislatures and courts, both state and federal, to interdict racial discrimination and violence. Like Pudd'nhead Wilson, in which Twain transformed the changelings plot of The Prince and the Pauper into racial tragedy, the burlesque ending of Huckleberry Finn reflected the erosion of Fourteenth Amendment protections and the advent of what he considered the "second slavery" of Jim Crow, codified by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

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All the same, Twain was less a moralist than a fabulist--not to mention an opportunist--and his eagerness to crack wise, rather than be wise, must always be taken into account. In his time-travel novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, it is thus hard to tell if the democracy and industrial know-how that Hank Morgan imports into Arthurian England are in any way superior to medieval feudalism. Part carnival showman, part tyrant, Twain's hero ends up trapped in a bunker of enemy corpses created by his self-defeating technology of Gatling guns and electric fences.

Put differently, Twain, for all his greenhorn humor, was deeply pessimistic and no less cynical. His denunciations of injustice ebbed and flowed with his own fortunes. When he was wealthy, he lambasted those who would meddle with private property--"the communists & asinine government will go to work and smash it all," he warned--but having fallen into debt and clawed his way back to comfort (after nine penny-pinching years abroad and lecturing around the world), he railed against capitalism. In the meantime, money was money, and he cranked out frothy sequels such as Tom Sawyer Abroad, in which a minstrel-like Jim is thrilled to see the land of Moses from a hot-air balloon.

For this reason, among others, it is a mistake to enlist Twain in one or another ideological cause. Powers finds it instructive that he referred to United States military involvement in the Philippines as a "quagmire," and a recent scholar was delighted to uncover Twain's purported critique of the "capitalist as terrorist." But Twain's gloom ran deeper. Notwithstanding the intensity of his attacks on colonialism (as in King Leopold's Soliloquy) and imperialism (as in "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"), his doubt was absolute, his misanthropy universal. As he wrote in Following the Equator, "No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen."

Twain returned to the United States in 1900 and died, having outlived his only son, two of his three daughters, and his wife. His last works, many published posthumously, are set in a universe of blankness and fright where mysterious, corrupting figures visit their wrath upon the hapless, and familiar characters return in grotesque shapes. In Letters from the Earth, Satan proclaims his counter-Bible in eleven blasphemous epistles; in "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a cholera germ named "Huck" lives parasitically in the veins of a drunken tramp as though in a heavenly cosmos.

After his lifelong defiance of most every conventional belief, Twain was left with nothing in which to believe but figments of his imagination. What remained was a body of literature at once dazzling and bleak, along with a life story to match.

Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation professor of literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, and author of the forthcoming Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America.

Mark Twain

A Life

by Ron Powers

Free Press, 736 pp., $35

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