The idioms and sounds of Twain’s boyhood speech make a colorful, expressive language that may seem to meander but gets directly to the heart of a matter. Twain’s journalistic background helped shape his blunt, bare-to-the-bone style. That plain style assaulted the wordy romantic rubbish of his day. “Flowery writing” still means full of too many big, unfamiliar and empty words. Flowery language has given literature such a stigma that even now people who feel they aren’t educated enough to read literature are intimidated by it, afraid it will be above their heads. They expect it will be flowery. For generations, many people who can read quite well have been steered away from literature by this strange notion. Twain was one of the first writers in America to deflower literary language. He grabbed stigma, pistil, stamens and all. One of James Fenimore Cooper’s major crimes was that his characters talked in a flowery way. (Once in a while we need to go back to Twain’s attack on Cooper’s literary offenses to get our bearings.)
Cooper had a tin ear. But Twain demanded that dialect be authentic. He annotated his editions of Bret Harte’s works with notes on accuracy of dialect and seemed not to have been concerned about Harte’s sentimentality and other literary shortcomings. Mark Twain, the man who filled his autobiography full of lies and could turn anything into a tall tale, nevertheless wanted the way his characters talked to sound just right. The dialect had to suit his ear, match his memory of voices heard from his childhood in Missouri. It didn’t always have to be literal, but the sound had to be real. That was sacred; those voices were the music that came from his soul.
This language that could be stretched and accommodated and made to fit every circumstance depended absolutely on sound. By artfully working the rhythms and sounds of real speech into his writing, Twain emphasized the dignity and complexity of people often dismissed as illiterate. Their heritage is an oral tradition, based on sound and not print, so the language has nuances and textures that formal written English lacks. The language is biblical, historical, musical, close to elemental experience. Twain’s genius enabled him to plow this language into other forms of expression: standard English, literary English, even medieval and Shakespearean English. He plowed it in, turned it under, and allowed it to fertilize the growing American language. He brought the storytelling art from the frontier into the written language in such a bold way that American literature was defined by it.
A hundred years ago, Mark Twain was the most popular man in America. As we approach the end of the century, I’m thinking about him as lecturer, storyteller, music lover. I wish I could hear his voice from the stage right now. I imagine him in his white suit as he pets his cat, waves his magic wand, and orchestrates a work that reverberates down to our own time.
His voice and image loom as the major character—the artist—in his works. He seems so real; there are so many photographs, so many places around the world we know him from. He is so often quoted. It’s as if the reports of his death were indeed exaggerated. We imagine him through Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! (But did he really sound like a ninety-five-year-old man?) There are so many impersonators because he sprang from an oral culture and he was a stage performer. The oral culture is speeding along at present, replete with superstars and high-tech spectacles. Now, in our feverish fin-de-siècle CAT scans and ultrasound studies of the American heart and soul, it seems fitting to read Twain, especially The American Claimant, a neglected work that he published in 1892, near the end of his own century.
The American Claimant is enormous fun. I’m here to celebrate the mad energy of this strange novel. In it we have the pleasure of seeing Mark Twain’s imagination go berserk. The story rolls along like a tumbling tumbleweed, except faster. Twain himself woke up in the night laughing over his creation. He seems to have been on an acid trip during much of it. (Critics of this work mention loss of control.) The humor hurtles beyond tall tale into simon-pure absurdity—antics and situations that would seem right at home today on the BBC with Monty Python and The Goon Show. It may have been too farfetched for Twain’s time. In Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer’s regulation by-the-books imagination (prisoners are supposed to have rope ladders and pirates have to kill their victims) contrasts with Huckleberry Finn’s spontaneous, genuinely creative imagination; when he’s in a fix, Huck can invent an elaborate story on the spot—with setting, background, characters, intricate relationships. But in The American Claimant, the inventions spill out merrily, and none of them are required to make sense. Twain seems free to go along on a wild amusement park ride with Colonel Sellers, his mad scientist and huckster, and not notice the patches and lapses in the narrative flow. Twain is having too good a time to find fault with the outing.
The novel is a comedy of mistaken identities and role switches—familiar goods in Twain’s works—all revolving around a serious debate about whether aristocracy or democracy is superior. At the time, awareness of British nobility was still warm in American memory, democracy was still a new experiment, and the question of which would win out was still being argued. Can you become somebody, or are you just who you are by birth? Colonel Mulberry Sellers, who first appeared in The Gilded Age (as Eschol and later Beriah, not Mulberry), is the American claimant to the Earl of Rossmore’s title, held blissfully for generations in England by a line of alleged usurpers. Colonel Sellers is irrepressible. He is effusively, buoyantly optimistic, full of limitless possibility. He is also seriously deluded, brimming with harebrained ideas. Nothing is impossible for him. His scheming mind runs a mile a minute. He lives on the edge. When he learns he might be an earl, he can manage that, too. No problem. He can be an American entrepreneur by day and an English earl by night, with receptions at Rossmore Towers—otherwise his “rat-trap” of a house. He’s totally loopy.
“He’s all air, you know—breeze you may say—and he freshens them up; it’s a trip to the country they say. … [He’s] as popular as scandal” (42). That’s Sellers’ wife, Polly, talking. She’s a great talker, and good at clearing the fog. Colonel Sellers’ voluble wackiness leaves you reeling. He is the only Perpetual Member of a Diplomatic Body. He’s “a Materializer, a Hypnotizer, a Mind-Cure dabbler” (28). He’s a gadget freak, but his devices don’t work. The telephone on the wall is fake, though he sometimes talks on it. He rings a bell for a servant, but it has no wire, so he boasts that he told Graham Bell “in theory a dry battery was just a curled darling” (80). The book is full of marvelous schemes that prefigure DNA cloning, fax machines, copiers. Colonel Sellers invents the Cursing Phonograph, which stores up profanity for use at sea (sailors have to be cursed at during storms), and the decomposer, which saves up sewer gas and recycles it for illumination. These could be Goon Show plots.
Colonel Sellers struts along a bridge between Frankenstein and Star Trek. His plan to materialize dead people to use as an automaton labor force reminds me of the duplicator box in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Calvin’s duplicator is a cardboard box that creates doubles and triples of six-year-old Calvin, who reasons that the replicas can do his homework. Colonel Sellers bubbles, “We live in wonderful times.” But in those postslavery times, if everybody is free, with an equal chance to strike it rich, who does the labor? Colonel Sellers’ scheme is a wishful solution to the wrenching question of social class in a democratic society.
He was originally modeled, as I’ve said, on Major James J. Lampton, a cousin from Twain’s mother’s side of the family. The Colonel Sellers in The American Claimant also owes a debt to Twain’s older brother, Orion Clemens, a gentle man with a good heart and boundless energy and eccentric notions. He fooled around trying to invent a flying machine until Twain put a stop to it. (Twain’s business sense was notoriously cockeyed.) Colonel Sellers draws on Twain’s father, too. John Marshall Clemens had a fanciful hope that his investment in some Tennessee land would be a legacy for his children. (The Tennessee land shows up in The Gilded Age and seems to have been a guiding principle for many of Twain’s aspirations.) And Jesse Madison Leathers, a distant cousin, pl
agued Twain for years to help him track down the family lineage and reclaim the estate of the Earl of Durham, which he believed was theirs. In Twain’s novel, Colonel Sellers inherits his earldom claim from the previous claimant, Simon Lathers. The Leathers-Lathers Clemens-claimant interplay of fiction and fact is one of the seesaw games Clemens-Twain always enjoyed.
Not only does Colonel Sellers seem to reflect so many of Twain’s own kinfolks, but he is also an American type. After the success of The Gilded Age, William Dean Howells (who subsequently collaborated with Twain on a Colonel Sellers play) had encouraged Twain to write more about Sellers, whom he saw as the quintessential American character. And so he is, in his pragmatism, opportunism, good-naturedness. And of course to this day there are actually people like Colonel Sellers who compulsively tell their mad stories, and really believe them. They often call themselves “Colonel.” One of the characters says that in the South everybody’s a colonel. In Kentucky, it is an institution to be named a Kentucky Colonel, an honorific. There are thousands of them (I’m one).
Colonel Sellers also reflects a side of Twain himself. When Twain wrote this novel, he was in financial difficulty with his ill-fated investment in the Paige typesetting machine. Like the colonel, Twain was always investing in some invention, trying to make a killing. In 1891, when he started The American Claimant, he was also working on a history game he had devised. At the time, a silly maze-and-marbles game called Pigs in Clover was sweeping the nation. It was the Rubik’s Cube of its day. It turns up in The American Claimant as a trifling game Mulberry Sellers tosses off the top of his head and doesn’t expect success from, but to his amazement it turns out to be a big hit and he makes “stacks of money.” Twain must have felt at least a little envious about the pig-game fad. He had patented a few inventions himself—a dry-mounting scrapbook and a garment-fastening device—but he had little success with any of his investments. “Pigs in clover” was an expression meaning “rich people who behave indecently.” The original expression was “happy as pigs in shit.”
The language in this novel shines. There are wonderful names. Two of the main characters, Sellers and Hawkins, are selling and hawking their way through the age of tycoons that Twain dubbed “the Gilded Age.” There’s a girl called Puss, and a One-armed Pete, as well as Simon Lathers and Colonel Mulberry Sellers. (Greenberry and Littleberry were popular first names in the nineteenth century, and Twain may have stretched Mulberry and Huckleberry out of those.) A name gets in the way of the romance between Sally Sellers and Viscount Berkeley, alias Howard Tracy and One-armed Pete and Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass—the latter a perfect blend of the ridiculous and the snooty and the horrifying.
The Sellers family is a bunch of first-rate storytellers. Sally, Polly, and Mulberry Sellers: all those l’s in their names spring up from the soil of the oral tradition. Twain loved the sound of words and he knew how to string them by sound, like different shades of one color: “The earl’s barbaric eye,” “the Usurping Earl,” “a double-dyed humbug,” “a slouchy dabster.” He was always doodling around with words: “a splendid flunkey, all in flamed plush and buttons and knee-breeches as to his trunk, and a glinting white frost-work of ground-glass paste as to his head, who stood with his heels together and the upper half of him bent forward, a salver in his hands” (22).
Twain relied on the punch of plain words. The undercutting, deflating power of hard Anglo-Saxon words was essential to tone and attitude and meaning. The vigor of plain language had texture and substance: “a plaided sack of rather loud pattern,” “pauper-shod as to raiment,” “lewd American scum,” “his brother never was worth shucks.” “Hatchments” is a choice word. It means a panel bearing the coat of arms of a dead person, and Colonel Sellers nails “a couple of stunning hatchments” (55) to the front of his house. Because it’s not a commonly used word, yet is presented as if it is common as shucks, it’s a grabber. The British Earl of Rossmore “drew the line at hatchments.”
“The escritoire in our boudoir” (63) is high-toned, but set in a lowtoned context. As an utterance of Colonel Sellers in his earl mode, the French phrase crashes right down off of its pedestal. Twain’s humorous use of literary English punctuated with informal phrases is not just facile; in this novel he had a particular opportunity to experiment with language, by contrasting freewheeling American expressive idiom with the carefully poised empty utterances of the English nobility. Twain weaves together strands of standard English, highfalutin earl speech, idiomatic American speech, and snatches of amalgamated mid-South dialect—into an intricate fabric. This is no simple patchwork quilt. It’s more of a tapestry, fluid in its texture. Or maybe it’s a crazy quilt that has transmogrified into a tapestry, since a quilt is a rigged-up job, like Twain’s native speech. Twain blithely weaves the raggedy-looking bits together.
When Colonel Sellers puts on his Earl of Rossmore airs, his wife is likely to say “Oh, scat!” And when he shifts back and forth between the two forms of talk, we’re seeing his imagination totter between the illusion of being an earl, with unearned riches, and the dream of achieving success through his own efforts. Those efforts are always aimed at get-rich-quick schemes. In either case, wealth is the goal, and with it comes status; therefore, according to one of the characters, it stands to reason that anyone would be a fool to turn down a free earldom, whether he believed in democracy or not. Nobility may be un-American, but if it’s up for grabs, take it. That’s both American and human nature.
The story is built on this paradox, and the intricately blended language accommodates it, an organic resolution to the enigma of democracy versus aristocracy. The center of the resolution is based on a bit of wordplay: “Yes, he could have his girl and have his earldom, too.” If you can have it both ways, that means the matter can’t be split in two. Like the three baskets of ashes (thought to contain variously the young viscount) that can’t be separated into three distinct sets of remains, the ideological positions can’t be separated and labeled.
A happy romance can resolve any paradox. That’s the simple popular metaphor for resolution, but beneath the girl and the earl is a more complex grasp—woven into the nuanced language—of truth and human nature. Nothing is one or the other. It’s not Clemens or Twain, Hartford or Hannibal, earl or girl, but some of each. Good-hearted Colonel Sellers won’t pursue his claim if it means alienating his daughter’s new family; besides, she gets to marry an earl, usurper earl or not. And Colonel Sellers is distracted by another moneymaking challenge. His notion to use sunspots to reorganize the world’s climates seems to suggest that one might as easily mastermind the weather as mess with human nature. But Colonel Sellers goes out on a hopeful note, intending to do something about that weather. (Twain had said everybody always complained about it but never did anything about it. So he hires the colonel.)
With Twain’s writing, and The American Claimant is no exception, the reader often has the feeling that his artistic judgment was so mixed up with his life that he couldn’t see the difference between what would make a great work and what would make money. But this is Colonel Sellers all over again. This naiveté, a basic characteristic of the yokel, which the yokel-gentleman never quite gets rid of, is both strength and handicap. The Colonel Sellers inside him allowed Twain to astound the world with his fresh voice but may have prevented him from finding his proper sense of self.
It makes most sense to read this entertaining novel in an autobiographical light. The claimant theme runs through Twain’s writings, and he was in a way a claimant himself all his life, coming from a Virginia planter-class family that once had aristocratic pretensions, before the lure of the frontier taught the necessities of making do. Much has been made of the deep division in Twain’s personality. He questioned whether he was a humorist or a literary writer, Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain, prince or pauper. To my mind, the most significant split was between his early life west of the Mississippi River and his later life in the Northeast. I’m awed by his heroic struggle to tame his uncou
th background in order to become a cultivated Victorian gentleman and crash the literary scene of the Northeast. That culture was at odds not only with his Western/journalist/sagebrush-Bohemian/riverboat-pilot identities but also with his Southern heritage. (His people and the settlers of Hannibal were Southern, with large numbers from Kentucky.) I imagine that many of the contradictions and paradoxes in Twain’s life and writing come down to that mile-wide-Mississippi gap between his formative experience and the land of his aspirations. I don’t think a person ever truly transcends his background, and so I feel keenly the contradictions of the irreverent but hopeful claimant Samuel Clemens of Hannibal and points west arriving in the drawing rooms of Hartford society. He must always have suspected he was a pauper in princely garb, something of a fraud. He tried to conform to the behavior of polite society and give up his bad habits, but couldn’t—and wouldn’t—entirely. I’m pleased that he couldn’t keep from draping his legs over the sofa arms, and tickled that Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich found him so boorish and that she was appalled by his fabulous sealskin outfit. I recognize the need to hide one’s insecurity by acting and dressing outrageously. It’s a way of keeping something of yourself and rebelling against what you’ve agreed to join. He was a parvenu, they said sneeringly in Hartford. I think about the gap between Olivia Langdon and Samuel Clemens—how he could never really share the South with her.
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