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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
"Mark Twain," Ken Burns' new documentary, brings to feisty, heartbreaking life the most beloved -- and American -- of American writers.
Jan 14, 2002 | During Ken Burns' lifetime tour of all things archetypally American, it was probably inevitable that he make a stop at Mark Twain. Twain may or may not be our greatest writer, but he is unquestionably our most beloved -- and the most quintessentially American. He grew up on the banks of the great river that flows through the heart of the country, and after a self-inventing career as a printer, riverboat pilot, prospector and newspaperman, ended up a New England grandee and the nation's gaudiest literary legend -- a picaresque red, white and blue life made even more familiar by the fact that he then squandered it all. But above all, Twain is ours in a way no other American writer is because of his language -- that is, our language. If Twain single-handedly invented American literature, as Ernest Hemingway and a number of other people who have some standing to say such things have claimed, it was because he heard our voices true and gave them back to us.
Burns' "Mark Twain" makes this essential point clearly and forcefully. At the beginning of the film (which is in two parts, each two hours long), Ron Powers, a Twain biographer who is one of the most eloquent of the film's many experts, says, "[His] genius was for speaking the voice of America." The playwright Arthur Miller comments that Twain "wrote as though there had been no literature before him" -- a marvelous and marveling tribute from one great writer to another. Hal Holbrook, longtime star of the famous one-man stage show "Mark Twain Tonight" -- whose almost personal relationship with Twain gives his comments emotional force -- says, "He made American speech something to be admired." And so the stage is set for the story of a writer whose swaggering mastery of the vernacular and willingness to talk about America's hidden shame, race, not only changed our literature but, as the film observes, changed the way we think about ourselves.
"Mark Twain" gives a vivid sense of this screamingly funny, deeply sad, daughter-worshipping, money-mad, unbelievably fortunate, tragedy-plagued border ruffian and genteel New Englander who gave American literature -- to use the highest term of praise in Huck Finn's lexicon -- its "sand." Though it is not without flaws, it leaves you, like all good biographies, with the paradoxical feeling that its subject can't really be summed up, but that you know him anyway -- and that you know him in a way that he didn't, couldn't, know himself.
"Mark Twain" will inevitably be compared to Burns' larger documentaries. This is somewhat unfair: "Jazz," "Baseball" and "The Civil War" were not only much larger subjects, Burns had the advantage of being there first. Mark Twain, a legend in his own lifetime and the subject of a torrent of biographies and scholarly and critical works, is well-trod ground indeed. A fairer comparison would be to Burns' "Thomas Jefferson." Both are fine films -- well-researched, solidly written, accompanied by Burns' usual well-chosen selection of fascinating and sometimes remarkable archival photographs. But "Mark Twain" -- at least its first episode -- is more gripping, if only because Twain is a far more robust (if not more complex) character than the elusively cerebral Jefferson.
"Mark Twain" succeeds in pulling off a difficult task: bringing together popular history and the subtler genre of literary biography. Burns, his longtime collaborator Geoffrey Ward and co-writer Dayton Duncan are sophisticated enough, and have assembled a smart enough team of Twain scholars and writers (the commentators include Russell Banks, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, John Boyer, Jocelyn Chadwick and Dick Gregory) to convey the drama and pathos of his creative struggles and successes without resorting to simplistic pop-psychological analysis.
From the start, the emphasis is on Twain the humorist. This makes sense, since whatever else he is, Twain is the funniest major writer in the history of world literature. "I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri," "Twain" drawls at the beginning of the film. "The village contained 100 people and I increased its population by one percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town. There is no record of a person doing as much -- not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place -- even London, I suppose."
The film deals sensitively with Twain's early life in Florida and Hannibal, Mo., revealing his early and crucial exposure to black slaves on his uncle's farm, including one named Uncle Dan'l. "I think that race was always a factor in his consciousness, partly because black people and black voices were the norm for him before he understood there were differences. They were the first voices of his youth and the most powerful," says the writer David Bradley. (The film glosses over the fact that Twain acknowledged that there was an unbridgeable gulf between him and the black friends of his youth.) It moves on to his job as a printer's apprentice at age 14, his grand achievement in becoming a Mississippi pilot and his agony -- the first of many sorrows that would befall this fearless, restless, softhearted genius and glorified scam artist.
The stagecoach trip he took out West with his brother Orion (that years later was completely transformed for his comedic purposes in "Roughing It") is dealt with gloriously: as the narrator reads a wonderful passage in which the stagecoach-riding Twain extols the virtues of "ham and eggs and scenery," along with a good pipe, as all that is required for human happiness, we see the open West rolling by. Then come his rollicking days as a newspaperman in Virginia City and San Francisco (described by Powers as a "great proto-psychedelic, counterculture newspaper society out West"), followed by his weeks of slinking about in shame and his near suicide after being fired from his San Francisco newspaper job. (The "slinking" days are accompanied by what appear to be some of those wonderful misty, murky Arnold Genthe photographs of Chinatown.) He gets his big break with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- his first review describes him as "foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press."
Twain began the lecture career that was to save him financially after a trip to Hawaii. His advertisements use the portentous five-stacked-headlines style of the day to excellent effect:
A splendid orchestra
Is in town, but has not been engaged.
Also,
A den of Ferocious Wild Beasts
Will be on exhibition in the next block.
Magnificent Fireworks
Were in contemplation for the occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.
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