“The memory of it,” Mark Twain concludes—and by now all satire is drained away—“will outlast all the thrones that exist today. In the whole history of free parliaments the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes its imposing place among the world’s unforgettable things.”
He is both wrong and right. Wrong, because the December 1897 parliamentary upheaval in Vienna is of course entirely forgotten, except by historian-specialists and readers of Mark Twain’s least-known prose. And right, because it is an indelible precursor that not merely portends the profoundly unforgettable Viennese mob-events of 1938, but thrusts them into our teeth with all their bitter twentieth-century flavor. Here is no déjà vu, but its prophesying opposite. Or, to say it otherwise: a twenty-year-old rioter enjoying Mark Twain’s Vienna easily becomes a sixty-year-old Nazi enjoying Anschluss Vienna.
In the immediate wake of the introduction of the militia, the government
came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews [who were by and large German-speaking] and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.
ALL THIS was in progress while Europe continued to boil over Dreyfus. Living on top of the fire, so to speak, Mark Twain could hardly overlook the roasting Jews. Consequently, a few months after his parliamentary reports, he published in Harper’s, in March of 1898, a kind of sequel to “Stirring Times in Vienna”—a meditation entitled “Concerning the Jews.” Part polemic, part reprimand, part self-contradictory panegyric, the essay was honorably motivated but ultimately obtuse and harmful. The London Jewish Chronicle, for example, commented at the time: “Of all such advocates, we can but say ‘Heaven save us from our friends.’ ” (In the United States in the 1930’s, pro-Nazi groups and other antisemites seized on portions of the essay to suggest an all-American signature for the promulgation of hate.)
Mark Twain was not unaware that Sholem Aleichem, the classic Yiddish writer, was affectionately called “the Jewish Mark Twain.” This was because Sholem Aleichem, like his American counterpart, was a bittersweet humorist and a transcendent humanist; and also because he reflected his village Jews, sunk in deepest poverty, as intimately and faithfully as Mark Twain recorded the homespun villages of his American South. Both men were better known by their pen names than by their actual names; both stood for liberty of the oppressed; both were eagerly read by the plain people—the “folk”; and both were nearly unprecedented as popular literary heroes. Sholem Aleichem certainly read Mark Twain (possibly in German translation), but it is hardly likely that Mark Twain read Sholem Aleichem. Even the smallest inkling of Sholem Aleichem’s social content would have stood in the way of the central canard of “Concerning the Jews.” And to contradict that canard, and to determine the real and typical condition of the shtetl-bound mass of European Jews, Mark Twain had only to look over his shoulder at those Jewish populations nearest to hand in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Instead he looked to the old hostile myths.
To be sure, “Concerning the Jews” is remembered (perhaps mainly by those who have never read it) as charmingly philosemitic. A single witty—and famous—sentence supports that view: “All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” And we can believe Mark Twain—we do believe him—when he avers that he makes “no uncourteous reference” to Jews in his books “because the disposition is lacking.” Up to a point the disposition is lacking; there is plenty of evidence for it. A curious science-fiction sketch called “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904”—written about the same time as “Concerning the Jews,” and striking for its “invention” of the “telectrophonoscope,” or television—turns out to be a lampoon of “French Justice” as exemplified in the punishment of the innocent Dreyfus; and if a savage satire can be felt to be delectable, this one is.
The disposition is lacking in other, less political, directions. Jewish charitableness, Jewish generosity, Jewish responsibility are all acknowledged—for the moment. The facts, Mark Twain declares,
are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crime and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessential of good citizenship.
And all this is followed by another accolade: the Jew is honest. The proof of it is that the “basis of successful business is honesty; a business cannot thrive where the parties to it cannot trust each other.” Who will not affirm this generality? Now add to the assertion of Jewish honesty this quip about the “Jewish brain,” from a letter to an American friend, written from Vienna in 1897: “The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew … is about the difference between a tadpole’s and an Archbishop’s.” We may laugh at this, but let liberal laughter be on its guard: the Jew, the essay continues, “has a reputation for various small forms of cheating … and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it.” From none of this does Mark Twain dissent. So much for his honest Jewish businessman. And so much for praise of the “Jewish brain,” which takes us straightway to “cunning contracts” and “smart evasions” and the old, old supersessionist proposition that Judaism attends to the “letter,” and not to the “spirit.”
Still, the overriding engine of this essay is situated in a much larger proposition. “In all countries,” Mark Twain tells us, “from the dawn of history, the Jew has been persistently and implacably hated, and with frequency persecuted.” From the dawn of history? And if so, why? Not because the Jew has been millennially blamed for the Crucifixion; “the reasons for it are older than that event,” and reside entirely in the Jew’s putative economic prowess; theology doesn’t apply; at least the Gospels and Pauline and Augustinian traditions don’t apply. Skip the Crucifixion, then; penetrate even more deeply behind the veil, into those still earlier mists of pre-history, and let the fault land on Joseph in Egypt—Joseph the provider, “who took a nation’s money all away, to the last penny.” There is your model for “the Jew”! “I am convinced,” Mark Twain insists, “that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree to religious prejudice.” And here is his judgment of the root of the matter:
No, the Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest.… In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite—but that they all worship money; so he made it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty-six centuries ago; he was at it in Rome …; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy—but it has paid, for it has brought him envy, and that is the only thing which men will sell both soul and body for.
Reading this, who can help thinking that all of it could go down quite nicely in the Austrian parliament of late 1897, not to mention the Viennese street? There is enough irony here to make even the devil weep. The truth is that Mark Twain was writing of Jews as “money-getters” at a time when the mass emigration of poor Jews by the hundreds of thousands had already begun to cram the steerage compartments of transoceanic ships—Jews in flight from economic hopele
ssness; and when the meanest penury was the lot of most Jews; and when Jewish letters and Jewish lore and Jewish wit took “poor” to be synonymous with “Jew.” And here comes Mark Twain, announcing that the Jew’s “commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.” He might have taken in the anguished testimony of Sholem Aleichem’s Jews; or the deprivations of Galician Jews down the road, so to speak, from Vienna; or the travail of Russian Jews penned into the Pale of Settlement. Or, in his native land, he might have taken in the real status of all those small storekeepers whose names he notes on their shop-signs (Edelstein, Blumenthal, Rosenzweig), while observing that “commercial importance” means railroads, banks, mining, insurance, steel, shipping, real estate, etc., etc.—industries where he would have been hard put to find a single Jew.
As it happens, he took in almost none of it; and, though eschewing theology, let himself be taken in by an ancient theological canard: the legacy, via the Judas legend, of the Jew’s affinity for money—the myth of the Rich Jew, the Jew Usurer. The very use of the generic phrase “the Jew” suggests stigma. Mythology, it develops, is the heart and muscle of Mark Twain’s reputedly “philosemitic” essay—the old myths trotted out for an airing in the American idiom. He said he lacked the disposition for slander. It would be wrong to dismiss this statement; but perhaps it would be fairer to suppose that he lacked the disposition for disciplined caution. He knew nothing of Jewish literary or jurisprudential civilization, or of the oceanic intellectual traditions of Jewish biblical commentary; he approached the Joseph tale with the crudity of a belligerent village atheist, and employed it to defame on economic grounds exactly as the charge of deicide defamed on theological grounds.
Yet he was surely capable of renouncing a canard when someone helped him to prise out the truth. The Jew, he had written, “is charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” “You feed on a country,” he accused, “but you don’t like to fight for it.” Nevertheless there is appended, at the end of this essay, a remarkable Postscript: “The Jew as Soldier,” wherein instance after historical instance of Jewish “fidelity” and “gallant soldiership” is cited—in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and especially the Civil War. It is not the admission of canard that is remarkable, but rather the principle drawn from it: “It is not allowable to endorse wandering maxims upon supposition.” That, overall, and despite its contrary motivation, is a precise characterization of “Concerning the Jews”—the endorsement of wandering maxims upon supposition. Only compare George Eliot’s “The Modern Hep Hep”—a chapter in her Impressions of Theophrastus Such, published just twenty years before Mark Twain’s wandering maxims—to see what a generalized essay concerning the Jews, engaging Mark Twain’s own questions, might attain to.
MARK TWAIN’S twenty months of residence in Vienna were among his most prolific. The fifteen short works collected in the 1900 edition of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays are a fraction of his output during this period; but they reflect the entire arsenal of his art: the occasionally reckless polemic, the derisive irony the intelligent laughter, the verbal stilettoes, the blunt country humor, the fervent despair, the hidden jeer, the relishing of palaver and tall tale, the impatient worldliness, the brilliant forays of language—sometimes for purposes of search-and-destroy, sometimes for a show of pure amazement, sometimes for plain delight in the glory of human oddness; most often for story-telling’s fragile might. Nothing is too trivial, nothing too weighty. And frequently the trivial and the weighty are enmeshed, as in Hadleyburg, when the recitation of a handful of words touches on depths of deceit. Or as in a lightly turned sketch—“My Boyhood Dreams”—that teases such eminences as William Dean Howells and John Hay (U.S. Secretary of State in 1898) with their failure to fulfill their respective childhood ambitions—steamboat mate and auctioneer; never mind that these “ambitions” are wholly of Mark Twain’s antic invention. But even so playful an oddment as this begins with a bitter reference to the humiliated Dreyfus.
In fact, aboard Mark Twain’s prose you cannot very long rely on the “lightly turned”—whatever sets out with an elfin twitch of the nostrils or a Mona Lisa half-smile is likely to end in prophetic thunder. “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It” starts off with a diaper pin and a twinkle, but its real theme is indifference to injustice—“the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.” From slaveholding to Dreyfus is but a paragraph’s leap: “From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France … lay under the smother of the silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and unoffending man.” And from Dreyfus how far is it to the “silent National Lie,” “whole races and peoples conspir[ing] to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and sham”? Beware Mark Twain when his subject looks most severely simple or mild-manneredly innocent: you may speedily find yourself aflame in a fiery furnace of moral indignation.
Sketches, fables, diatribes. Eight months before his death in 1910 he wrote, “I am full of malice, saturated with malignity.” More than two decades earlier he had exclaimed to Howells that his was “a pen warmed up in hell.” Yet—with relative benignity—the remainder of this volume treats of artists who are ignored while alive and valued only posthumously (“Is He Living or Is He Dead?”); of a train companion determined to set right every minor annoyance (“Travelling with a Reformer”); and of a celebrated inventor ordered by the Austrian government to teach grade school (“The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again”). But that is scarcely the finish of it—there are other exuberances. “The Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” not only supplies an ancient Greek version of the joke, but bursts into a spoof of word-for-word translation from the French. “How to Tell a Story” will remind readers of nighttime ghost-scares at summer camp, while “The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance”—an unrestrained comic lecture on the relative nature of wealth—would hardly pass muster in a contemporary multiculturalist classroom. “About Play-Acting” compares a serious drama in Vienna with the frivolous offerings cut from the New York theater advertisements of Saturday, May 7, 1898; Broadway at this hour (despite spectacular technical advances) is not a whit more substantive or sophisticated. “At the Appetite Cure,” with its praise of starvation as the key to health, reflects Mark Twain’s own belief in the curative virtues of abstinence from food—a crank piece; but here the jokes are crude and cruel, with a Teutonic edge of near-sadism. All the same, the most stirring—the most startling—real-life narrative in this volume, “My Debut as a Literary Person,” concerns starvation; in extremis, at sea, in a small boat, after a shipwreck. Mark Twain defines it in a minor way as a journalistic scoop, but for power, passion, character, and suspense, it belongs among his masterworks.
All these romances—some as slight as skits, and one as rich and urgent as a novel—were set down in Mark Twain’s Vienna: a cosmopolis driven by early modernism, saturated in music and theater, populated by gargantuan cultural figures whose influence still shakes the world (Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, to mention only these), ruled by rogues (two of Hitler’s idols among them), on occasion ruled by mobs; a society gaudily brilliant, acutely civilized, triumphantly flourishing, and also shameless, brutal. Part heaven, part the devil’s precinct. An odd backdrop for a writer reared in Hannibal, Missouri. But in Vienna Mark Twain was close to the peak of what he called his “malignity,” and Vienna served him.
Along with Dreyfus in Paris, it gave him a pen warmed up in the local hell.
* Mark Twain and an avalanche of literature before him employ “man” to represent humankind; and so will I, without a trace of feminist shame, when the grace of a sentence depends on it.
SAUL BELLOW’S BROADWAY
On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about t
he doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed …
THIS IS Saul Bellow’s “Broadway uptown” in the middle of the twentieth century. “The carnival of the street,” he called it, “the dust going round like a woman on stilts.” Four and a half decades on, the Upper West Side (roughly from the Seventies all the way up to Columbia University on 116th Street) still clings to Broadway’s pouring, pressing, teeming wadi, and the dizzying dust, though descended from its stilts, still goes round and round, crawling into your nostrils and stippling its egalitarian stucco over every race and kind. The fruit stores are still there, run by Koreans. The inexhaustible current of voices is still there, though you are less likely to hear remnants of Yiddish and more likely to hear torrents of Spanish, in dialects up from the Caribbean, from Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, even Mexico. The elderly ladies are still there in the coffee shops, “rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and [they] used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age,” and though they still take you in with their youth-ravenous painted stares, the blue hair is as out-of-date as the butcher shop sawdust, and their old New York faces compete now with the Inca faces from the side-street tenements and the lost faces of the homeless on their shreds of blankets. The butcher shops, meanwhile, have mostly been swallowed up by the supermarket chains. And the “cafeteria with the gilded front” is gone.
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