by Peter Turchi
Justin Kaplan, author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, writes that
he was always his own biographer, and the books he wrote about [his first thirty] years are incomparably the best possible accounts, even if they may not always be the truest. . . . But the central drama of his mature literary life was his discovery of the usable past. He began to make this discovery in his early and middle thirties—a classic watershed age for self-redefinition—as he explored the literary and psychological options of a new, created identity called Mark Twain. . . . This usable past, imaginatively transformed into literature, was to occupy him for the rest of his life.
In other words, Mark Twain’s development was a lifetime project focused largely on learning to shape his experience toward a variety of effects. Past experience was his raw material, and the full development of the persona who became his narrator, Mark Twain, was the result of exploring “literary and psychological options.”
Like Melville, Twain made different uses of his material. As a hyperbolic travelogue full of strong opinions about everything the author encountered, Roughing It can be seen as a precursor to Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a romanticized version of his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, is a more conservative crowd pleaser, a novel woven from anecdotes about actual people and places. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes a dramatically different perspective on the setting and people in the world of Tom Sawyer—the “usable material” of Sam Clemens’s past—with an emphasis on slavery, morality, and the individual’s relation to society. Those were significant issues for the author as an adult, as he felt increasingly alienated from the hometown and even the river of his youth. Instead of striving for a single emotional effect—comedy, or nostalgia tinged with comedy—in Huckleberry Finn Twain reached for a broad tonal range. By considering his childhood years in light of the Civil War, and by including both the ugliness and the beauty of the Mississippi and the people living near it, he created his finest novel. Certainly his choice of point of view is instrumental to the book’s success, but that’s “point of view” in the largest sense—not just the grammatical shift from the third-person narration of Tom Sawyer to the groundbreaking first-person vernacular of Huck, but the shift from a safe, static relationship to his past to a much more dynamic and potentially dangerous one. Initial responses to Huck Finn were mixed: the book was seen as unfunny, a failed sequel unfit for boys; and it continues to be banned and censored because Twain dared to use a word common not only in the world he described but also in ours.
On the surface, young Sam Clemens was less like rebellious, independent Huck Finn, more like mischievous Tom Sawyer. Creating Huck, then fully imagining the world as seen through the eyes of the son of the town drunk, encouraged his creator to view the world differently. The adult Sam Clemens grew to be more like Huck, the outsider, since he was observing, more than fully participating in, his hometown of Hannibal (St. Petersburg, in the books). What he saw made him want to inspire more than laughter in his readers.
The movement from comic travelogue to boyhood adventure tale to more introspective novel was by no means natural or easy. Clemens worked on Huckleberry Finn fitfully, setting it aside for several years. The book had been conceived as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, but Clemens began to resist that novel’s voice and perspective. In the same way that he created the character Mark Twain—the acerbic, white-suit-wearing, publicly performing Great Man—he had created a world for Tom Sawyer that made it a boys’ book: a book for boys (and nostalgic adults) as much as it was about boys. Just as Erik Weisz / Harry Houdini moved from traditional magic tricks to dramatic “escapes”—from illusions focused on anonymous assistants and elephants to illusions focused directly on the Houdini character he was creating—Clemens/Twain reevaluated both how he wanted to sound on the page and what that voice would allow him to say. Clemens’s brother was killed in a steamboat accident; Sam himself served briefly in a band of Confederate guerrillas before withdrawing and reconsidering his allegiances. By the time he was working on Huckleberry Finn, the steamboats of his youth had all but disappeared, and any number of towns he knew had been destroyed by the war. The voice he had created for Tom Sawyer didn’t allow him to access the complexity and darkness of the world that now interested him.
Well, my book is written—let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library—and a pen warmed-up in hell.
— Mark Twain, letter to William Dean Howells, September 22, 1889
When his progress on Huckleberry Finn stalled, Twain turned to another project: he developed a series of autobiographical sketches he had written for the Atlantic Monthly under the heading “Old Times” into Life on the Mississippi. Like Moby-Dick, Life on the Mississippi is a compelling but curious combination of fiction and nonfiction, anecdote and philosophizing. Twain combines essentially true sketches and stories with comic exaggerations à la Roughing It; he follows a serious and angry brief essay on the marketing of burial services with a satirical bit of fiction on the same topic; and he quotes and paraphrases a wide variety of source material. He ranges from yarn-spinner to sage, lying outrageously on one page and writing sincerely, movingly, on another.
Jonathan Raban writes,
The young humorist Mark Twain was an entirely different kind of animal from the young pilot Samuel Clemens; and Mark Twain would commit himself to so befogging and my-thologizing the past of Samuel Clemens that it would turn into the best and most glorious of the writer’s inventions. The “Old Times” pieces were fiction—a fiction made credible, in every sentence, with autobiographical fact. . . . They created a golden age of innocence and harmony. . . . [But] it was a fiction that could not be indefinitely sustained. . . . [He] created, in manuscript, the clear and powerful voice of Huckleberry Finn: a voice without literary precedent. Life on the Mississippi counts the cost of that creation. It shows Twain in the act of wrestling with the demons of language—battling, in parody and pastiche, toward a new way of rendering the world in writing. Style after style is tried and found wanting.
We may be inclined to think of great pieces of writing as perfect from beginning to end, weaving a consistent and long-lasting spell. While there may be poems and even stories that seem unimprovable, word for word, perfection is harder to sustain for the duration of a novel. Many readers (including Hemingway) feel the final section of Huckleberry Finn is badly flawed. But one can easily imagine that, if he had written it earlier in his career, Mark Twain would have been satisfied to make Huck a comic novel; and if he had written it late in his life, he might have made it more didactic, similar to his late stories. Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi capture his writing at a particular state of crisis, between times when he felt confident about what he wanted to do and how to do it. That struggle animates both books.
While Mark Twain is one of the most famous cases of an American writer adopting a persona, we all do it: the voice we present in our writing, no matter how sincere, no matter how well-intentioned, in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, is a guise—one we’re constantly working to create and refine and adapt to the project at hand.
GRAFT, AS NECESSARY
A review of a collection of John Updike’s early stories noted that it is surprisingly easy to read them from beginning to end because they essentially tell the story of a life, a life of a man in many ways quite similar to John Updike. Updike himself wrote a great deal about his use of life experience.
The small town was Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal mill town with a variegated population and a distinguished Puritan past. It seemed a town full of stories. . . . We shopped at the Atlantic & Pacific supermarket, so I cooked up a story called “A&P.” I drove my daughter to her music lesson, and out came “The Music School.” A car accident occurred at our corner, and thus
“The Corner.” I fell into the local version of the sexual revolution, and out came a bundle of variations on the story of Tristan and Iseult. My wife, as a fictional character, got ever more talkative and alluring as our marriage became ever more fraught with resentments and tensions. I was hip-deep in neighbors and friends, children and pets; I gossiped, I drank, I played golf, I attended church. This was life, and I shaped and polished off odd fragments of it to send away in brown manila envelopes.
Updike is sometimes criticized for the very casualness implied there: “I drank, I played golf . . . I shaped and polished odd fragments of [my life].” A remarkably prolific writer, he devoted his days to writing novels, stories, poems, reviews, essays, and more. It’s no surprise that the work isn’t consistently intense or evocative, and that some of the stories read like “polished fragments.” In another essay he’s a bit more forthcoming about recognizing and confronting challenges to this approach:
I wrote a ten-page non-fictional memoir, called “The Real Story” [about being taken] to the local factory where footballs were made. . . . I wished to enter into this toilsome noisy creation of something real, solid, kickable, tossable. But the story came out too reminiscent, for me, of an earlier story. . . . My voice and invention faltered once the bliss of grafting muscles and a jingly-jangly, bar-snappy wife onto my alter ego were past. So I gathered my courage and dismissed the flimsy celebrity-persona and plunged nakedly into the lives of these factory workers.
Transforming experience into fiction involves “grafting” parts onto an “alter ego”—and realizing when to dispense with that alter ego. Which is to say, we need to recognize when to dismiss a representation of the self and to “plunge nakedly” into invention of character and voice.
EXPLORE, INVESTIGATE, ARTICULATE
David Shields began his career as a fiction writer whose work drew on autobiography. His later work, which still draws heavily on his own experiences and observations, is most often classified as nonfiction, but he has little interest in the distinction. Many of his books contain what appear to be candid revelations—about his health and his father’s, about his fantasies as he makes love with his wife—as well as what appear to be invented or reconfigured events. Factual truth is not the point. In an interview in the Writer’s Chronicle, Shields said,
At its best, the work is what Yeats called “a mirror turn lamp.” That is to say, you explore yourself as deeply as you possibly can, and by getting to the deepest parts of yourself, you’re actually getting to what makes all of us human, which is trouble . . . At its worst, you are just reciting the facts of your life, or are flattering yourself or celebrating yourself or promoting yourself or even just simply lambasting yourself. It’s a very difficult balance. . . . I’m interested in . . . going as deeply into myself as I possibly can, and via that excavation, getting to very difficult things about myself, and thereby creating, I hope, as rigorous a portrait as possible of one person’s existence on the planet . . . what excites me is the depth of the emotional and intellectual investigation.
Strange as it might seem, several of his books—which are not so much plotted as the-matically arranged—have something in common with Moby-Dick and Life on the Mississippi, as they combine observation, quotation, paraphrase, and fiction, and what they capture, as much as their stated subjects, is the writer’s passionate engagement with his material, in whatever form it takes. Unlike Melville, and even more than Twain, Shields stands close to center stage—increasingly, his books are about his attitudes, his opinions, his actions, the writing he likes, and the writing he dislikes—and he clearly enjoys playing the role of provocateur. But he isn’t simply being “honest” or “revealing”; he is still taking a stance, striking a pose, “creating . . . a portrait.”
MEET THE DEMANDS OF THE THING BEING MADE
In case you’re wondering about that elephant:
Houdini’s assistants rolled a very large rectangular cabinet—possibly eight feet high, eight feet wide, and fourteen feet long—onstage. Doors were opened on one end. A trainer led the elephant into the cabinet, the doors were closed, and the assistants turned the cabinet so that the opposite end was facing the audience. The front doors were opened, then the rear doors, allowing spectators—or at least the ones in the middle of the auditorium—to see through to the back of the stage.
According to Jim Steinmeyer, Houdini had a diagonal wall built inside the rectangular cabinet. The wall ran from the front corner to the center of the back of the cabinet, and one side was covered by a mirror that reflected the black interior. When the illusion began, with the cabinet turned sideways, the elephant was simply led straight into the space between the outer wall and the interior diagonal wall.
Ta-da: the elephant was nowhere to be seen.
Unless you get great pleasure from what you’re doing, performing a magic trick can feel like taking actual candy from an actual baby. A great many prop-dependent tricks require no special talent except for the one Houdini didn’t have: the talent to play the role of magician. Or, to put it another way, the talent to make believers believe. Because the great majority of people who pay to see a magic show want to be deceived, or enchanted: they want to see something magical, just as the reader who picks up a novel or story wants to be transported. We may never know why, but it could be that the role simply didn’t fit. Hungarian-born, Wisconsin-raised Erik Weisz started out, after all, trying to imitate a famous Frenchman. So while it’s true that Weisz was his most captivating, his most exciting, his most mythical, when he was squarely at the center of attention, Harry Houdini was a disguised self, an artistic creation—sometimes dressed in the traditional white shirt and black suit that never seemed to fit him, but often, more characteristically, stripped to the waist, displaying his impressive physique, as if he had nothing to hide. As if.
Houdini’s elephant cabinet, viewed from above
Poorly presented, magic tricks can seem like just that: trickery. The performer presents the audience with a puzzle to solve (How did that happen? or What really happened?), but the audience knows that it has been denied crucial information. Viewers aren’t really being invited to solve the puzzle. The resulting tension can lead to anger, heckling, even violent attempts to storm the stage or dismantle props. The magician needs to create an air of belief, of possibility. His goal is to transform the puzzle into seeming mystery—to persuade the audience to marvel at the effect rather than to focus on how it was achieved. Magic, like fiction, plays on our childlike desire to believe in other worlds, transcendent possibilities, if only for a little while. Houdini was able to do that as an escape artist, in the guise of an enormously successful persona that didn’t happen to be the magician persona he initially aimed to create. Many of us begin writing by imitating, consciously or not, writers we admire; eventually we might “find our voice,” as the cliché goes—but only if we work to find it. And we might discover, while we’re hunting, that a persona chooses us, that a particular stance serves our work best.
Why is it so important to create that persona, to carefully consider which of our many possible and invented selves we use to tell a particular story? Because while a piece of writing can access the universal only through the individual, there is danger at either extreme. Attempts to reach the universal directly yield blandness, cliché, or a generality true, finally, to no one’s experience. At the other extreme is the self-indulgent, the narcissistic, the selfishly private. “The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity,” Flannery O’Connor wrote. “No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing being seen and the thing being made.” Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt echoes her: “There is a way, I think, in which the careful making of poems can distance or externalize the self—the gaze remains steadily outward, and the self becomes another small part of the world. The point is not to prohibit the personal, but to examine it with utter ruthlessness.”
The mod
el magician was Robert-Houdin because, more than anything else, magicians had been captivated by his astounding memoirs . . . that painted the portrait of a magician as an artist.
— Jim Steinmeyer
The creators of that exhibit of self-portraits in France chose for its posters and advertisements not a work by one of their own countrymen but one by an American: Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait.
At first glance, Rockwell’s image is simply a self-portrait one step removed, showing the artist at work. Almost immediately, though, we see another level of artifice: the image of the artist reflected in the mirror borders on comic in a way that Rockwell made famous. If we’re uncertain whether we’re laughing at or with the painter, we’re tipped off by the painting within the painting. The presumed self-portrait, or supposedly accurate transcription of what the artist sees, bears only partial resemblance to what the painter sees in the mirror. The image on the canvas is something like noble. Gone are the glasses; the sagging pipe is raised, as are the eyebrows; and the painting appears to be in black and white, further emphasizing its removal from reality. Tipping the scale is the prop helmet at the top of the easel, further mocking the image of Greatness. Attached to the canvas are reproductions of self-portraits by painters Rockwell especially admired: Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, and Van Gogh.
Triple Self-Portrait, Norman Rockwell