T H E G O S P E L O F M A R K | P A G E 2
I heard Twain in the voices of the black kids I played pickup football with in high school. "Hey you slow-assed mofo, white boy burned yo' lame ass! Ha, ha, ha!" The gloating, joyous cries echo and drift across the Berkeley field, carrying back to a 10-year-old boy standing in a Missouri farmyard a century and a half ago, listening to a middle-aged slave called Uncle Dan'l. It was from Dan'l, and others, that Twain absorbed the loose-jointed, sharp-stressed speech, shared with differences by both races in the young country's South and West, that has always been the real keeper of American time. Twain wouldn't forget that supple syncopation -- or the man. "I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as 'Jim,'" Twain wrote of "Uncle Dan'l" toward the end of his life. "It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of 60 years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then." Twain must have moved around, race-wise. For I also heard him in the voice and comportment of the Virginia redneck with whom I once uneasily shared the operating compartment of a 28-ton crane. The guy was not the sharpest knife in the drawer (he couldn't even teach me, a freshly-certified Yale dropout, how to operate the damn thing), his racial views were unenlightened and he passed his numerous leisure moments looking at a dismal collection of soft-core porn comics, but his deadpan, soft-macho Southern demeanor fascinated me. It wasn't until later that I realized where I'd heard that languid, vaguely menacing drawl: in Mark Twain. And Twain wasn't just mixed up with my life. His characters kept popping up on the national stage. Ross Perot, for instance, was an obvious reincarnation of the Duke. The militia movement? Huck's Pap after a bath. Pat Buchanan? Huck's Pap after a bath and a shave. Money-grubbing politicians? "I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislators that bring higher prices than any in the world." The juries that wouldn't convict the Menendez Brothers and O.J. Simpson? Descendants of the august juridical body in "Roughing It," which Twain described as "composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three bartenders, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkees! It actually came out afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were the same thing." (Sorrowful editorial interjection: The expression "dull, stupid, human donkees" may stir suspicions in certain quarters that Twain is not always as solicitous of various groups' self-esteem as he might be. Those suspicions, alas, are correct. It was not worthy of enlightened feminist dictates, for example, for Twain to disingenuously assert that he was "feverish" to get rid of polygamy "until I saw the Mormon women." Nor was it ethically acceptable of him to pretend that, "touched" by pity and with a "generous moisture" in his eyes, he said, "No -- the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure -- and the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence." There is no getting around it -- the man is almost monumentally politically incorrect. But of course he was not possessed of the Fenimore Cooper-like wisdom of our insatiably aggrieved age.) Twain's appeal is universal -- uncannily so. People who hate "lit'rature" love Mark Twain as much as English professors do. Waitresses and taxi drivers, clerks and factory workers take a piece of his action -- and so do speculators and hustlers, celebrities and politicians. Gonzo journalists, as they squat in their tepid hot-tubs clutching drooping sticks of dynamite, are forced to admit that the man had already been there, done that (in "Roughing It"); travel writers discover his footsteps, hipper and fresher than theirs, in "Innocents Abroad." Sentimentalists can never match his tears; cynics can never match his darkness. Even Nietzsche loved "Tom Sawyer" -- and he was a notoriously tough sell. Twain is the least envied, most beloved figure in American letters -- "The Lincoln of our literature," as his friend and champion William Dean Howells put it. Indeed, we think of Twain as somehow transcending literature, existing in a realm where his deeply American history and our own identities become indistinguishable. As Roy Blount Jr. points out in his rollicking, penetrating introduction to the first volume in the monumental new 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, parodying Twain would be impossible for an American writer: "It would be like doing an impression of your father or mother: He or she is already there in your voice." Yet this man who has become a virtual American myth never wrote a single flawless major work (with the possible exception of "Tom Sawyer"). There is no "House of Mirth" in Twain's oeuvre, no " Sun Also Rises," no "Sound and the Fury," no "Great Gatsby." His greatest work, "Huckleberry Finn," is marred by its ending, as is his comic masterpiece "Roughing It"; "Pudd'nhead Wilson" careens through its mordant plot at excessively high speed; and "Life on the Mississippi," like so much of the work of a man who was scrambling for money throughout his life, is padded with second-rate material. Moreover, the trajectory of Twain's literary career does not conform with our wishes: It started out with a bang, hit its peak in the early middle, and then went into a slow fade -- with some brilliant exceptions -- lasting more than two decades. So why do we continue to hold Twain in such a special place in our hearts? Because even his literary shortcomings seem those of a giant. Because we still see ourselves in him. Because he is the funniest writer who ever lived. And because, for some reason that runs in our blood, we just like the guy. As Howells wrote of "Innocents Abroad," "There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature." Those are good enough reasons. |
NEXT PAGE: Twain's mission in life: "A call to literature of a low order"
hen I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally
take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him
before -- met him on the river," Twain wrote in "Life on the Mississippi." His words can be
turned around: Twain's own sprawling, unruly work is a vast river on which
we meet, and above all hear all of the quintessentially American
characters -- every king, queen and joker in the whole crazy deck.