Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  When the film shows Wilberforce coming to visit Newton, the minister is the very picture of repentance: he wears a monk’s rough cloth robe and is cleaning the floor of his church, barefoot. Wilberforce says, “You told me that you live in the company of twenty thousand ghosts—the ghosts of slaves.” Albert Finney, who plays Newton with a trembling passion worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, then tells Wilberforce to fight the slave traders: “Do it, Wilber! Take them on! Pull their dirty filthy ships out of the water! The planters, sugar barons . . . do it! For God’s sake!”

  The reality was starkly, embarrassingly different. Most inconveniently for sin-and-repentance storytellers, John Newton was converted to evangelical Christianity before making four transatlantic voyages as a slave-ship officer, not afterward. He left the trade for reasons not of conscience but of health. And when he was later ordained a minister, he still had all his savings invested with his former employer, who had a fleet of slave ships on the ocean. Newton said not a word in public against the slave trade for more than thirty years after he left the sea, during much of which time he was the most famous evangelical preacher in England. There is no evidence whatever that he mentioned slavery when Wilberforce first came to see him. He spoke out on the subject for the first time only when a huge mass movement was under way and it was no longer possible for so prominent a former slave trader to be silent. He then wrote a pamphlet against the trade, testified twice at parliamentary hearings, mentioned the subject once or twice in sermons, and otherwise did not raise it again in public for the remaining two decades of his preaching and writing life. He devoted endless sermons, however, to what he believed was “our national sin”—blasphemy.

  • • •

  Amazing Grace is only one of many ways in which Britain marked the abolition bicentenary. Commemorative events were staged throughout 2007 by every conceivable institution from the House of Lords to the Socialist Workers Party. Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed his “deep sorrow” for the slave trade. Mayor Ken Livingstone of London declared, “The British government must formally apologize. . . . All attempts to evade this are weasel words.” A special £2 coin commemorated the end of the slave trade and a new set of stamps honored both black and white abolitionists. Queen Elizabeth II attended a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Virtually every major museum in the country mounted exhibitions. The archbishops of Canterbury and York posted a video on YouTube about their visit to a slave prison in Zanzibar. More than £20 million from the national lottery funded slavery-related projects organized by local governments. A group of Wilberforce admirers marched from Hull to London in yokes and chains.

  By contrast, in 1907, not a single event commemorating the centenary made it into the London Times index for the year. But it is a different Britain today: more than 11 percent of the population of London, for example, is of African or West Indian descent. Traditionally, black Britons have voted Labour; the government was eager for anything to take people’s minds off its embrace of the disastrous American venture in Iraq. Still, the immense attention lavished on the abolition bicentenary can’t be seen as political expediency only. More and more Britons are aware that they are living in an increasingly multiracial society, in a country whose full history involves far more than kings and queens. Furthermore, some of the commemorative events were staged by members of the black community itself.

  On a cold March afternoon in 2007, for instance, I was one of several speakers at a small ceremony to dedicate a bicentennial plaque in a park in Ealing, a part of London where many Caribbean immigrants and their descendants live. A borough councilor welcomed everyone, and some of the participants lit a candle and planted a tree—symbolically, a variety of palm that does well in northern climates. A minister poured a vial of salt water over the new plaque, for the tears that had been shed by those in bondage. Four children from a local school, two black, two white, read from William Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint,” the most widely sung antislavery ballad of the 1780s. Its opening lines, “Forc’d from home and all its pleasures . . . O’er the raging billows borne,” surely evoked for older West Indian immigrants assembled at the park their own journey across the ocean to a new and often difficult life in England. At the end of the proceedings, everyone scattered flowers in memory of those who died as slaves. Four municipal park workers in green safety vests, three of them white, one black, waiting to tidy up the grounds after the ceremony, had been standing nonchalantly off to the side in the manner of gravediggers at a funeral. Unexpectedly—and I found this moving—they came forward to scatter flowers as well.

  In Britain’s black press, there were occasional grumblings about the year’s events as a “Wilberfest.” But for the most part, people heard a more genuine story. Many of the year’s more than two dozen special BBC programs having to do with slavery and abolition—documentary, drama, and hybrid—touched on subjects such as slave revolts, modern-day racism, and reparations. There were so many programs, the producer of one told me, because a group of black employees had gone to the BBC’s director general to ask for extra air time for the bicentenary. Liverpool, the country’s largest slave port, opened a new £10 million International Slavery Museum on August 23, 2007, the anniversary of the start of the great Haitian uprising. Anyone today in Britain who turns for information about slavery to a museum, a bookstore, or radio and TV will quickly find a far richer and more informed version of this history than was easily available a generation ago.

  • • •

  Why, then, does Amazing Grace revert to telling the story in such a determinedly old-fashioned way? The filmmaker’s job is to entertain us, of course, not to stick to the minutia of history or to reflect the latest scholarship. But is there something else going on?

  There is. The movie’s principal financier, Philip Anschutz, is an American businessman who has long sought to fund a film about Wilberforce and who had been turned down by various big-name directors in the past. Anschutz is a tycoon with a vast empire of holdings in real estate, cattle, oil, newspapers, railroads, and sports teams, including the Los Angeles Lakers. In 2002, Fortune named him the country’s “greediest executive” for selling more than $1.5 billion in shares of Qwest Communications, of which he had been chairman, before the company announced it had inflated its revenues and its stock price collapsed. A major backer of the evangelical Right, Anschutz has also been a significant donor to George W. Bush and to groups opposing everything from gay rights to abortion to the teaching of evolution.

  Although he has not given a press interview since 1974, it’s not hard to guess why Anschutz was so eager to make this film. Most important for all of Wilberforce’s present-day political admirers on the Right like Anschutz and Pence is to celebrate him as someone whose Christian fundamentalism was central to his politics. Amazing Grace makes sure that we get this message. We see, for instance, Wilberforce having his ecstatic moment of evangelical conversion in a bucolic meadow. “You found God, sir?” a servant asks him. Wilberforce replies, “I think he found me.” Later, over a dinner table, Clarkson says to him, “Mr. Wilberforce, we understand you’re having problems choosing whether to do the work of God or the work of a political activist.” The evangelical writer Hannah More (played by Georgie Glen) quickly adds, “We humbly suggest that you can do both.”

  This is the message the film wants us to carry away: that God’s work is best done by a wealthy, virtuous man like Wilberforce, who is against slavery and various forms of sin but questions nothing else in the social and political order. But just what is the work of God? Almost all believers might agree that it is a matter of opposing slavery. But is it a matter of opposing abortion, and gay and women’s rights as well? Or, is it a matter of fighting to narrow the gap between rich and poor? President George W. Bush, who hosted a special screening of Amazing Grace at the White House, has several times suggested that God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. More than a century ago, President William McKinley said that “God Almighty” to
ld him to annex the Philippines. People hear God say very different things, many of which have to do with advancing somebody’s interests here on earth. All of which speaks for great wariness when politicians claim to be doing God’s work.

  Did Philip Anschutz closely control the way Wilberforce’s story was presented in this film? Perhaps he didn’t have to do so with too heavy a hand. If you want to downplay or ignore the slave rebellions and a sometimes unruly grassroots movement and emphasize the politics of pious, from-the-top-down benevolence, it is enough to simply tell the story of this pivotal moment through the character of Wilberforce. But when history now allows us a far deeper and richer look at British abolition, it is a pity that artists of the caliber of Michael Apted and Steven Knight have lent their talents to such a tamely traditional and misleading film. Although Apted claims its slippery distortions are “accurate,” he is in fact presenting no more than a Sunday-school version of one of history’s great liberation movements.

  2007

  * * *

  * Who has since, of course, gone on to higher office.

  America

  FIGURE 6. Mark Twain.

  TWENTY

  Pilot on the Great River

  MARK TWAIN’S NONFICTION

  SOME GREAT WRITERS LIVED LIVES that seem limited to only a small slice of human experience—Proust, Austen, Dickinson—but nonetheless they saw far and deep. The lives of others—Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—far overflowed what they were able to get between the covers of their books. Mark Twain is among the overflowers. His work does not begin to contain the breadth, contradictions, and tragedies of his life.

  It was a large and restless one, which stretched from the era when doctors bled their patients to that of the automobile and the airplane, from the boundless freedom of his childhood (read the passage in his autobiography about skating on the frozen Mississippi under moonlight, as ice floes break up and separate him from land) to crossing the country by stagecoach, sleeping atop mailbags, in the aftermath of the California Gold Rush. As a young man, he heard Charles Dickens read David Copperfield aloud from a New York stage; as an old one, he played miniature golf with a college president who had not yet gone into politics, Woodrow Wilson. He began as Sam Clemens in the riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri; as Mark Twain he traveled the world as the most renowned American author of his time, received by princesses and presidents, explorers and emperors, even the admiring shah of Persia. The young Kipling made a pilgrimage to meet him; Sigmund Freud came to hear him speak. Yet, amid these triumphs, Twain saw his beloved wife and three of his four children die before him.

  He denounced the love of money and helped coin the phrase “Gilded Age” but hobnobbed happily with Andrew Carnegie and other robber barons, vacationed on the 227-foot yacht of one of them, preferred the fanciest of hotels, and lived in a palatial mansion with Tiffany furnishings, a marble-floored entrance hall, and a staff of seven. Hankering after still greater wealth, he spent himself deep into debt by investing money, his own and borrowed, in a long string of muddleheaded inventions. The most disastrous was one whose failure could have been predicted by a mechanically minded teenager: a typesetting machine with eighteen thousand separate parts. Into this hopeless dream the ever-optimistic writer poured the equivalent of well over $3 million in today’s money. It would take another Twain to get all of this into a novel.

  His work, like his life, was of volcanic proportions. An editor entitled one anthology Mark Twain in Eruption. In addition to the more than thirty books he published during his lifetime, Twain wrote thousands of newspaper articles and left behind some fifty notebooks and six hundred unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. Over his seventy-four years, it is estimated, he wrote at least fifty thousand letters. The eruptions never ceased. On April 13, 1897, after working on his travelogue Following the Equator, he wrote triumphantly in his notebook, “I finished my book today.” Five weeks later came another entry, “Finished the book again. Addition of 30,000 words.”

  On top of all this material, Twain left behind, largely unedited, some half million words of recollections about his life. The more famous he became, the more often people pressed him to write his autobiography. But he claimed that all written memoirs were fraudulent; instead he would create the first truly honest one by dictating his, to be published in full only after his death. “If I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years,” he declared, “I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me.” Between 1906 and 1909, the year before he died, he made a good start on the hundred years, dictating bountifully in 242 sessions.

  Rambling from one corner of his life to another, free-associating, embroidering stories he had once written, mixing fanciful anecdotes, personal experience, and pungent opinions with news items and half-finished sketches, Twain’s dictated eruptions most resemble a genre that would not be named for nearly another century: blog posts. This mountain of proto-blogging, sometimes with earlier bits of autobiographical writing mixed in, has been repeatedly reshaped by different editors since his death, depending on whether the compiler wanted to present an apolitical, avuncular Twain, an autobiography at manageable length, an all-inclusive colossus, or Twain’s life in chronological order rather than in the meandering fashion in which he actually recounted it.

  No matter which version of the autobiography you read, it is not one of the great literary memoirs. It digresses wildly, drops famous names, has patches of mawkishness, and assumes (true for readers then, but not necessarily now) that we already know a good deal about his life. There are many pages about billiards and bowling. The whole thing could use a careful rewrite. Nonetheless, it yields sudden stretches of great beauty, like shafts of sun falling on a mountainside, as when he describes childhood visits to his uncle’s farm: “I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees . . . the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass.”

  One of the fascinations of the dictated autobiography is that we can see some of the sources for his greatest work of fiction, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not just the boyhood figures who were to some degree the models for Huck, Tom Sawyer, and others, but the spirit of that boyhood: the universe of woods, fields, caves, and islands to be explored in an age without supervised after-school activities; the pervasive acceptance of slavery; the small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business; the great river coursing past, as ceaseless as the flow of time itself. And in his recollections we can also see Twain’s knowledge of the wider world beyond Hannibal: its chicanery, its illusions, its lust for gain, and its cruel gulf between rich and poor. Without the experience of all this he never could have imagined into being, in his childhood landscape, an outlaw like Huck.

  • • •

  Another crucial part of Twain’s nonfiction, perhaps more so than for most other writers, is his letters, for the window they provide onto his soul is less mediated and controlled by Twain than the dictated autobiography. Through the letters we can feel his thrill at seeing new countries, his enjoyment of his growing fame, and his perpetual dreams of making a fortune through a magically successful investment. We see his immense gratitude when his friend the novelist and editor William Dean Howells gives him the greatest gift any writer can give another, which is to mark up a manuscript, in this case The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Although Twain was startlingly willing to let his wife, Howells, and others prune material out of his writing, almost everyone else was so in awe of him that he received too little of the tough, intelligent, critical feedback that could have benefited his more ragged and loquacious books.

  Nonetheless, he did have another way of testing the effect of his words, integral to honing his prose. During the course of his lifetime, he gave well over five hundred lectures, readings, commencement addresses, or a
fter-dinner speeches, more than 140 of them just on one exhausting, round-the-world, 53,000-mile speaking tour he undertook to pay off his huge debts. “I know a great many secrets about audiences,” he says in one letter, “secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.” He learned to speak in a way that would appeal equally to the 25-cent customers in the balconies and those in evening dress in the front row. He was wearied by this endless round of performing, but at the same time he reveled in it, noting carefully which lines worked and which didn’t, learning the value of a drawl and a calculated pause.

  This part of his life made him a shrewd and interested judge of other performers. His best work all seems born to be read aloud—which usually it was, first to an audience of his wife and daughters and then on stage. It is this side of Twain that the actor Hal Holbrook brought to life by staging constantly changing versions of his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight! on Broadway, on television, on recordings, around the country, and across the world for more than sixty years. This talented imitator of Twain has himself had many imitators.

  To return to the letters: above all, they let us feel with Twain what lay behind his statement that “the source of all humor is not laughter but sorrow.” He feels responsible for the agonizing death of his brother, lethally scalded when a boiler exploded on the steamboat where Twain had gotten him a job. The blows that would come later in his life help account for the darker tone of the writing from his final decade and a half. When spinal meningitis takes the life of his favorite daughter, the 24-year-old Susy, it is all the more painful because it comes when he is away from her, in England finishing up that mammoth international lecture tour. “She that had been our wonder and our worship,” he calls her. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Some weeks after the news of her death, still deep in mourning, he writes to his friend Rev. Joseph Twichell that “she was my superior in fineness of mind, in the delicacy & subtlety of her intellect . . . I know her better now; for I have read her private writings & sounded the deeps of her mind; & I know better, now, the treasure that was mine than I knew it when I had it . . . And now she is dead—& I can never tell her.”