by Gore Vidal
Benares has its usual grim effect. Here, beside the Ganges, bodies are burned; and people bathe to become pure while drinking the polluted waters of the holiest of holy rivers. It is interesting that Twain never mentions the Buddha, who became enlightened at Benares, but he does go into some detail when he describes the Hindu religion. In fact, he finds the city of Benares “just a big church” to that religion in all its aspects. In Calcutta, he broods on the Black Hole, already filled in. The Taj Mahal induces an interesting reverie. Twain notes that when one has read so many descriptions of a famous place, one can never actually see it because of all the descriptions that crowd one’s mind. In this perception, Twain anticipates the latest—if not the last—theory of how memory works. He also broods on the phenomenon of Helen Keller, born deaf, dumb, and blind; yet able to learn to speak and think. How does the mind work?
From India, Twain and company cross the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. Although he often alludes to his lecturing, he never tells us what he talks about. He does note, “I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.” We learn that he dislikes Oliver Goldsmith and Jane Austen. As a prose writer, the imperialist Kipling beguiles him even though Twain likens empires to thieves who take clothes off other people’s clotheslines. “In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief.” He is more tolerant of the English. But then he is a confessed Anglophile.
Meanwhile, the ship is taking Twain and family down the east coast of Africa. South Africa is in ferment—Boers against English settlers, white against black. Cecil Rhodes is revealed as a scoundrel. But Twain is now writing as of May 1897, one year after his visit to South Africa, and so the outcome of all this is still unclear to him. He sides with the English, despite reservations about Rhodes and company. “I have always been especially fond of war. No, I mean fond of discussing war; and fond of giving military advice.” As for that new territorial entity, Rhodesia, Twain remarks that it is “a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it”; and he also has Pudd’nhead Wilson observe: “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
Finally, “Our trip around the earth ended at Southampton pier, where we embarked thirteen months before. . . . I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years. . . .” But he had now seen the whole world, more or less at the equator, and, perhaps more to the point, quite a few people got to see Mark Twain in action, in itself something of a phenomenon, never to be repeated on earth unless, of course, his nemesis, Mary Baker Eddy, were to allow him to exchange her scientific deathless darkness for his limelight, our light.
The New York Review of Books
23 May 1996
* REPLY TO A CRITIC
While writing about Mark Twain’s views on imperialism, I checked some recent “scholarly” works to see how his reputation is bearing up under the great fiery cross of political correctness. We were all astonished, some years ago, when a squad of sharp-eyed textual investigators discovered, to their manifest surprise and horror, that the noblest character in Twain’s fiction was called “Nigger” Jim. There was an understandable outcry from some blacks; there was also a totally incomprehensible howl from a number of fevered white males, many of them professors emeritus and so, to strike the tautological note, career-minded conservatives unused to manning barricades.
In an apparently vain effort at comprehension, I quoted a number of malicious and, worse, foolish things that these silly-billies are writing about Twain. Thanks to an editorial quirk, one hothead was mentioned by name, for which I apologize. I always try to shield the infamous from their folly in the hope that they may, one day, straighten up and fly right. But a single name was mentioned and now we have its owner’s letter at hand. For serene duplicity and snappy illogic it compares favorably to some of the screeds, I believe they are called, from my pen pals in the Lincoln priesthood.
Although my new pen pal does acknowledge that I am reporting the views of other critics on Twain’s impotence, sexual infantilism, fondness for small girls, he declares mysteriously that this is “not what I say.” But it is what he says and presumably means. The Jesuits like to say: “The wise man never lies.” But in the army of my day, any soldier (or indeed discomfited general) who spent too much time twisting about the language of regulations in his own favor was called a guardhouse lawyer. I now put the case on the evidence at hand, that we have here a compulsive guardhouse lawyer or quibbler. Straight sentences must be bent like pretzels to change meanings to score points. But then much of what passes for literary discourse in these states is simply hustling words to get them to mean what they don’t. “That Clemens dreamed of little girls is well known.” Thus Quibbler wrote but now he has—tangential?—second thoughts. Actually who knows what Twain’s dreams were. But let us agree that he doted on the company of Dodgsonesque girls and so may well have dreamed . . . fantasized about them in a sexual way. Why not? But Quibbler is getting a bit edgy. He thinks, too, that I have given him a splendid chance to open the guard-house door. Now we improvise: “that his dreams and reveries were pederastic is not said in my book by me or by anyone else.” But, of course, that’s what the professor (and presumably, those whom he adverts to) means in the course of a chapter entitled “Impotence and Pedophilia.”
But Quibbler has leapt at the adjective “pederastic.” Like so many Greekless Americans with pretensions, he thinks that the word means a liking for boys by men with buggery on their mind. But I had gone back to the original noun root, paid, from which comes pederasty, pedophilia, etc.; and paid means not boy but child. A quibble can be made that, as vulgar usage associates the word with boys, that’s what I mean but, as context makes clear, it is Lolita-paid—not Ganymede-paid—that Twain may be dreaming of. So this quibble is meaningless.
“The idea of impotence excited Clemens’s anxious interest: apparently he suffered from erectile dysfunction at about the age of fifty.” I noted in my review that “so do many men over fifty who drink as much Scotch whisky as Twain did.” Next: “Psychoanalysts have noted many cases in which diminished sexual capacity . . . has been related to a constellation of psychic problems like those which affected Clemens.” All right. Which psychoanalysts? Did any know him? As for his psychic problems, did he really have a constellation’s worth? “Evidence that he became impotent ranges from the filmy to the relatively firm”—I had some fun with those two loony adjectives. “Likelihood is high that diminished capacity may be inferred . . .” All these “apparentlys,” “likelihoods,” “inferreds” as well as filmy to firm “evidence” appear in one short paragraph.
What we have here is not a serious literary—or even, God help us, psychoanalytic—view of Twain’s sex life as imagined by a politically correct schoolteacher but what I take to be outright character assassination of a great man who happens to be one of the handful—small hand, too—of good writers our flimsy culture has produced. (“Filmy,” of course, may be the mot juste if we count the movies.) At one point, in the midst of a prurient flow of nonsense, the professor suddenly concedes, “We do not know the intimate details of Clemens’s life very well. . . .” I’ll say we don’t, so why go to such imaginative length to turn him into an impotent pederast, or pedophile?
Point two. Here we get the denial-of-meaning quibble based on Absence of Quotation Marks. I remark on Twain’s having, sickeningly, in the professor’s view, “married above his station in order to advance himself socially.” Blandly, the professor quibbles that he never used the italicized words. Yet they are an exact paraphrase of how he interprets Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon. Quibbler has reinvented his own text. Actually, it is his view that Twain did not marry above his station in any but the economic sense, although “like the most bourgeois of the bourgeois he delighted in money, and high living, and he fervently wished to become a member of the eastern establishment.” Surely, to get from Hannibal, Missouri, t
o the Gold Coast of Hartford was going to take a bit of social climbing, which he did by marrying into the Langdon family.
“Clemens was what Freud would call a narcissistic suitor.” Quibbler acts as if he is quoting some sort of authority in these matters. Ward McAllister might have been more to his point on American social climbing. “[Clemens] ardently wished to marry a woman who typified not what he was but what he wished to be—rich and possessed of status, a member of the eastern social order.” So, as I said in a phrase to which Quibbler objects, for no clear reason, “he married above his station.” (I’m surprised he does not make the point that Grand Central Station was not in use that hymenal year.) My use of the adverb “sickeningly” was meant to be ironic, something to which the teaching of school tends to make impervious even the brightest and the best. Anyway, Twain’s hypergamous marriage was a happy one, so what’s the big deal?
A lust for money that is banal anal (as opposed to floral oral) is simply a verbally symmetrical way of setting up Freud’s notion of money as “faeces.” How did I happen to get this juxtaposition in my head? At one point, our author suddenly quibbles that Twain didn’t marry Olivia for her money, at least “not in any banal sense of the phrase; but he very much wanted to be rich.” As I read the word “banal,” I knew that Freud’s theory of anality was coming up. I turned the page. There it was. “Freud stresses the anal character of money and equates money and feces: it means power, vitality, potency.” The one good thing about bad writing is that one is never surprised by any turn an argument, much less a cliché, may take.
Let me now indulge in quibbler creativity. Freud would never have characterized Twain as narcissistic—an adjective currently used to describe anyone better-looking than oneself. As performer-writer Twain took by storm Vienna in general and Freud in particular. Freud was also something of a connoisseur of jokes and he enjoyed Mark Twain in person and on the page quite as much as he would have reveled in the letter of Professor Emeritus Guy Cardwell. Ich kann nicht anders, I can hear Sigmund chuckle through his cigar smoke. (Cf. The Strange Case of Dr. Luther Adler by an Unknown Actress—op. cit. Just about anywhere.)
The New York Review of Books
19 September 1996
* TWAIN’S LETTERS
Reporting for the BBC during the election campaign, I stood in front of the Albert Hall, the voice of the crown in parliament incarnate, John Major, still ringing in my ears as, inside, a recording of Elgar caused a thousand gorges to rise, including that little part of me which is forever Dimbleby. I faced the BBC cameras. A petit mini-mini-documentary was in progress. “Here,” I said, head empty of all but emotion, “is the proof that only through England’s glorious past can a bright future be secured for this land of Drake and Nelson, of Clive—and Crippen.”
The BBC crew was ecstatic: like television crews everywhere, nobody ever listens to what the talking head is actually saying. What had come over me? What on earth was I doing? Well, like most American writers at one time or another, I was playing Mark Twain. The deadpan sonorous delivery. Then the careful dropping of the one fatal name. With Twain’s description of the Albert Hall flashing in my head, “a dome atop a gasometer,” I dimbled on to the safe ground of the understated cliché.
Mark Twain is our greatest . . . Mark Twain. He is not, properly speaking, a novelist nor “just” a journalist nor polemicist. He is simply a voice like no other. The only mystery to him is this: was he a great comic actor who could also write much as he acted, or was he a great writer who could also act, like Dickens? Some evidence of how he did both is now at hand in the form of the 309 letters that he wrote in the years 1872–3, when he first visited England and took the country by storm as a performer (the books Innocents Abroad and Roughing It had already, despite—or because of—their Americanness, been popular). England also took hugely to the 36-year-old Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Mo., and Hartford, Conn.). To his wife, Olivia, he wrote, after six months’ residence in the Langham Hotel (later to contain the BBC’s secret abattoir), “I would rather live in England than America—which is treason.” The fact of the matter is that he was having a wonderful time being lionized by London’s tamers, ever on the lookout for a good joke. But then, as he himself put it, he was “by long odds the most widely known and popular American author among the English.” This was true too.
On Twain’s first trip he did not lecture. On his second, accompanied by wife and daughter, he filled halls with a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which he eventually tired of and replaced with one on his early days in Nevada, based on Roughing It.
The liking for a country not one’s own (or for a celebrity not one’s own) is usually based on serious misunderstandings all around. Twain’s comedy was based on a Manichaean view of life. But neither audiences nor readers suspected the darkness that was at the core of his curious sensibility. As for Twain himself, in England he was very much the passionate pilgrim, to appropriate Henry James’s phrase (it can safely be said that the two writers could not abide each other). Each in his own way had found American society a bit on the thin side. But where James was after very big game indeed, psychologically, Twain simply preferred local color, while reveling in a sense of the past that often came rather too close to ye olde. “Spent all day yesterday driving about Warwickshire in an open barouche. We visited Kenilworth ruins, Warwick Castle (pronounce it Warrick) and the Shakespeare celebrities in and about Stratford-on-Avon (pronounce that ‘a’ just as you would in Kate).” All in all, “I would rather live here if I could get the rest of you over.” As it turned out, by the end of his life he had lived 17 years abroad, much of the time in England.
But there are some marked oddities in these love letters to England. For one thing there are hardly any people in them, any English people, that is. Trollope had him to dinner at the Garrick, but he gives no description of this occasion even when writing to his bookish mother. He met Browning: no serious mention. He does ask the poet laureate to one of his lectures and, thoughtfully, sends along a ticket. Return post: “Dear Sir, I saw some of your countrymen last Sunday who spoke so highly of your Lectures that I longed to come and hear you; but whether I come or not I am equally beholden to you for your kindness. Yours with all thanks, A. Tennyson.” Not quite in the class of Disraeli, thanking an author for sending him a book “which I shall waste no time in reading.”
Where are the London hostesses of the day? Did they pursue him? He hated staying in other people’s houses so there are no descriptions of Bitter Homes and Gardens. For someone who had just finished a political satire, The Gilded Age (a “partnership” novel, he called it, with Charles Dudley Warner), he does not seem to have met any politicians other than the MP Douglas Straight, whose family was soon to be transatlantic. He does not mention what, if anything, he is reading. During his first London seasons he is simply absorbing color and drawing strength from the great crowds that come to hear him; first in Hanover Square and, later, around England.
These are very much the letters and thoughts of a businessman-actor-writer with a gift for comedy. He is, in short, a star on tour as well as a writer with an ever-alert eye for incidents to be used in such later books as A Connecticut Yankee and The Prince and the Pauper. Current productions by others (Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, and John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography) go unremarked.
So what then did British audiences actually see and hear? London Daily News: “Mr. Twain is a comparatively young man, small in form and feature, dark-haired and dark complexioned.” Actually, he was ginger-haired with a ruddy face. “He has a good deal of the nasal tone of some portion of the Americans.” London Examiner: “His dry manner, his admirable self-possession, and perfectly grave countenance formed a background that made the humorous portion of the lecture irresistible.” Often with no more than a carefully positioned pause, he would set up his joke, let the audience do the rest. “A smile never appears on his lips and he makes the most startling remarks as i
f he were uttering merest commonplace.”
But a predictably sour note was struck by the expatriate secretary to the American legation: “He [Twain] is a wiry man, with brown, crisp, wiry hair: a narrow forehead, Roman nose and sinister expression, and does not seem to know as much as would hurt him.” The secretary had once had literary longings.
Mark Twain’s Letters covers two years in 691 pages, of which one is blank except for the ominous phrase “Editorial Apparatus.” To come? One trembles. This is hardly a labor of love for the common reader. There are footnotes upon footnotes. Nothing is not explained. Twain meets a gentleman who affects a Plantagenet connection. The irrelevant history of that broomish family is flung at the reader.
American scholarship is now a sort of huge make-work program for the conventionally educated. In a case like this, scholar squirrels gather up every scrap of writing they can find and stuff these bits into volume after volume, with metastasizing footnotes. The arrangements that Mr. and Mrs. Clemens made to have their laundry and dry-cleaning done by mail (no, I won’t explain how that worked) is a joy for those of us who revel in dry-cleaning, but what of the unkempt many who sit in darkness? No matter. We are dealing here with ruthless collectors. To them, one “fact” is equal to any other. I accept this thoroughness. But is it necessary to note every phrase—indeed every letter of the alphabet that Twain and his various correspondents saw fit to cross out? Like this. No.
The Sunday Times
11 May 1997
* RABBIT’S OWN BURROW
A decade ago, thanks to the success of America’s chain bookstores with their outlets in a thousand glittering malls, most “serious” fiction was replaced by mass-baked sugary dough—I mean books—whose huge physical presence in the shops is known, aptly to the trade, as “dumps”: outward and visible sign of Gresham’s Law at dogged work. In spite of this, the fact that John Updike’s latest novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, briefly made it to the bottom of the New York Times best-seller list is remarkable. As it is a rare week when any “serious” novel is listed, one is usually so grateful that there are still those who want to read an even halfway good novelist, one ought never to discourage those readers whom he attracts. Also, what is the point of attacking writers in a period where—save for prize-mad pockets of old London—they are of so little consequence?