Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The “evasion chapter” debate has continued, and grown ever more complex. Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia sees unworthy slapstick in much of Jim’s behavior, yet maintains that the book presents two Jims: the noble, suffering figure on the raft who illuminates the cruelty of a society that deals in human bondage; and the comic-minstrel Jim at the beginning and end. The latter, Railton suggests, is Mark Twain’s concession to the core of racism among his readers.55

  This theory tends to discount the historical truth that many blacks in the 19th century, and into the 20th, learned to deflect the aggression of racist white people by developing a day-to-day protective layer of comic shuffling and deference. This survival strategy, variants of which are practiced within all enslaved societies, was designed to preserve, rather than cancel out, the nobler human qualities of the individual—such as the impulse to stand beside a valued friend (Tom) at great personal risk.

  In 1984, Charles H. Nilon introduced an arresting defense of the ending.56 The chapters are in fact a masterstroke: a sustained ironic allegory of white America’s attempts to circumvent the Reconstruction by devising as many cruel and unnecessary roadblocks to Negro autonomy. Bruce Michelson argued that it was all about identity evasion: Huck was on a quest to avoid “the disaster of becoming,” a quest that puts him in perpetual flight “from both the dark angel and the white.”57 (Dismissing the significance of “I’ll go to hell,” Michelson points out a decision by Huck that soon follows, regarding future struggles over right and wrong: “I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.”58) While intellectually fascinating, these notions would seem to assume a late 20th-century mode of thought—highly schematic, informed by sophisticated depth-psychology—in the mind of an intuitive 19th-century writer who’d previously shown no interest in allegory or Lacanian symbolism.

  In 1957 an explosive new indictment of the novel swept aside the literary critics and established itself as the defining controversy over Huckleberry Finn. Amid the gathering force of the civil rights movement, the NAACP condemned the novel as racist—a condemnation that rested in large part on Jim’s diction, and on Mark Twain’s 211 uses of the word “nigger.” Although passionately rebutted by critics and writers of both races—who have maintained ceaselessly that “nigger” did not reflect authorial intention but authentic regional/period dialogue, and that its appearance frequently made a satirical case against the speaker—the “racist” charge has never lost its grip on the novel’s reputation. Pressure by antiracist advocacy groups led to new bannings: in Virginia in 1982, Illinois in 1984, and Connecticut in 1995. Teaching of the novel survived challenges by parents and the courts in California, Washington, Arizona, and Oklahoma, and a student boycott in New Jersey.

  Many African-American writers and intellectuals, of course, have defended the book. Walter Mosley remarks that “my memory of Huckleberry wasn’t one of racism. I remember Jim and Huck as friends out on the river. I could have been either one of them.” Toni Morrison, acknowledging her unease at “this amazing, troubling book,” whose imperfections include “the disproportionate sadness at the center of Jim’s and [Huck’s] relationship” and also Huck’s “engagement” with a racist society, nevertheless concludes, “the rewards of my efforts to come to terms have been abundant.”59

  The case against the “racist” accusers received its most innovative support in 1996, with the publication of Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s audaciously titled Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. Fishkin, who champions the view that Huckleberry Finn is an explicitly antiracist novel, drew on a font of characteristics in Huck’s speech to argue that Mark Twain had modeled his dialect on that of “Sociable Jimmy.” Fishkin’s own critics have pointed out certain limitations in this argument—white and black children in the prewar South tended to share many nonstandard speech patterns, for instance—but the book remains a significant reminder that American literature, beginning with Huckleberry Finn, was irrevocably changed by African-American influences.

  THESE AND many other controversies have left deep imprints on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, encouraging students and general readers to approach the work not so much as literature but as battleground in the American culture wars. Against this century-long tidal flow of overwrought diagnoses, the Mark Twain scholar Thomas Quirk has issued a replenishing call: an invitation to read Huckleberry Finn less for what its various claimants would have it be, and more for what it is: an act of imagination, and one so propulsive that it pulled the author himself along into its created verities. “Whether or not Twain the man was a racist,” Quirk writes, “his imaginative parts created a character [Jim] who challenged Twain’s own moral nature.” Imagination, not political courage or piety, is what finally ennobles the book: “We become less and less interested in the anti-Southern, antisentimental, antiaristocratic, anti-everything-under-the-sun elements…and more and more concerned with its affirmations, which is to say we become more and more concerned with Jim. Jim not as a representative of the Negro, the oppressed, or the wretched, but as Jim.”60

  Robert Hirst, the editor in chief of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, agrees with the “Jim-as-Jim” approach, but with an emphatic difference: no external suppositions of any kind need be raised regarding the writer who created him. Everything that one need understand about Mark Twain’s motives may be found in the work itself. Against the most invidious supposition of all—racism—Hirst cites the powerful scolding, in Chapter 15, that Jim administers to Huck for toying with his mind after the two became separated in the fog.61 (“ ‘…En when I wake’ up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout, wuz how you could make a fool of old Jim wid a lie.’ ”62) After this tongue-lashing, Huck “humbles” himself to Jim.

  Calling Jim the supreme imaginative character of the whole book, Hirst speaks for more than a few scholars by noting that Jim denounces Huck’s racist treatment of him, pointing out that no other American author of the 19th century dedicated his masterpiece to combating postwar racism.

  THE STRONG initial sales of the novel, and the soon-to-come revenue from Grant’s memoir, were, amazingly, overshadowed by income from yet a third source. The “Twins of Genius” tour proved a financial bonanza, an artistic phenomenon, and a backstage psychodrama, befitting any American all-star road show—what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recognized as “a new form of popular entertainment.”63

  Mark Twain and Cable opened in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 5, 1884, a month before the first excerpt of Huckleberry Finn appeared in the Century. A hundred and three performances later, after covering eighty cities in the United States and Canada, they wound it up in Washington, D.C., on the last day of February 1885. Before audiences of up to a thousand people, the two men performed some of their greatest hits and tried out new material for about two hours a night. Cable sang a little. They feuded with the press and with each other through the press. They had at least one public confrontation. Exploiting Cable’s comparative stiffness onstage—he rattled through his readings in a brisk, polite style—Mark Twain worked the crowds like the Vandal of yore. He memorized the text of each performance and prowled the platform, his eyes searching the faces in front of him, drawling his drawl and timing his snappers to bombastic effect: he had his “Golden Arm” mojo working. He fed on the “long roll of artillery-laughter all down the line, interspersed with Congreve rockets & bomb shell explosions.” He exulted when “the old Jumping Frog swept the place like a conflagration.”64 He milked the applause for encore upon encore, and tried to figure out ways to curtail Cable’s face time. When it was over, Clemens had netted some $16,000, and Cable, $5,000. It would stand as Mark Twain’s last interlude of pure exuberant, prancing showmanship. But what an interlude—filled with marvels to overwhelm a noticing man’s senses. Things had changed along the lecture trail si
nce the old days, a decade ago. Clemens noticed that hotels had dry towels now, and electrical buttons had replaced the bell handle for summoning the maid. The telephone had replaced “the petrified messenger boy.”65 Most wondrous of all was the miracle of the new urban nightscape, bathed in electric light. In Detroit,

  [I] for the first time saw a city where the night was as beautiful as the day; saw, for the first time, in place of sallow twilight…clusters of coruscating electric suns floating in the sky without visible support, & casting a mellow radiance upon the snow covered spires & domes…& roofs & far stretching thoroughfares, which…reminded one of airy unreal cities caught in the glimpses of a dream.66

  Clemens had not yet gained complete mastery of all the changes. Arriving at Albany on December 3, he and Cable were greeted by a representative of Governor Cleveland, who had enjoyed Clemens’s support in the recent election. The president-elect “had expressed a strong desire to have me call.” In the midst of bantering with Cleveland, Clemens “sat down on four electrical bells at once…& summoned four pages whom nobody had any use for.”67

  In a Rochester bookstore, Cable handed Clemens a copy of Le Morte D’Arthur, the Thomas Malory romance about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Clemens read it, and immediately began to make notes for a strange new story forming in his mind.

  Have a battle between a modern army, with gattling guns—(automatic) 600 shots a minute, torpedos, balloons, 100-ton cannon, ironclad fleet…68

  Following a Christmas recess with the family in Hartford, Clemens rejoined Cable for the second half of the tour, commencing in Pittsburgh on December 29. American publication of Huckleberry Finn was only days away. By coincidence, Cable was just then in print with his own take on the Negro’s tortured route from bondage to freedom. His essay, “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” was gaining wide attention in the January issue of the Century—alongside the magazine’s second excerpt from Huckleberry Finn. It called for white America to “renounce the moral debris of an exploded evil” and to plant “society firmly upon universal justice and equity.”69 This required an end to racial dehumanization and a beginning of racial brotherhood. Failure to take up this task, Cable prophetically warned, will result in “a system of vicious evasions eventually ruinous to public and private morals and liberty.”70 Cable paid a price for this courageous stand; newspapers throughout his native Dixie denounced him as a betrayer of his heritage. But many others applauded him; newspapermen interviewed him at stops along the rest of the tour, and people of color flocked to his appearances to thank him personally.

  How Mark Twain felt about Cable’s essay and the attention it galvanized is not known. No evidence exists that he saw the piece’s sentiments as rebuking his evasion chapters; he may well have seen Cable’s work and his own as parallel attacks on the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. His only known comments on the audience response to his own reading show that he was delighted with the laughter. He continued to chart his own course toward a reckoning with the great mystery of race—a course that his new novel would continue on, long after his death. An entry in his notebook from the previous summer mused,

  I lose my temper over a certain class of business (begging) letters except when they come from colored (& therefore ignorant) people. Mrs. Clemens suggests that I adopt as a motto “Consider everybody colored till he is proved white.”71

  In the entry just before this, Clemens had returned to the notion that was moving steadily toward the center of his imaginative cosmology: the notion of Man and his world as mere meaningless specks in a larger, unknowable system. “I think the worlds that flow & swing through space are only the microscopic trichinae concealed in the blood of some vast creature’s veins, & that it is that vast creature whom God concerns himself, about, & not us,” he jotted in his notebook sometime in the spring of 1885; then, crossing out everything from “in some vast creature’s veins” on, he substituted the word: “God.”72

  On January 13, the tour brought Samuel Clemens once again to his native ground. He had asked the manager, Major James B. Pond, to schedule stops in Hannibal, and then in Keokuk. He had visited these towns just three years earlier, but he was unprepared for the emotional impact on this occasion. The “fountains of the great deep” that had reopened his childhood upon his marriage to Livy had shifted into something else, as he explained to his wife just days before their fifteenth anniversary.

  This visit to Hannibal—you can never imagine the infinite great deeps of pathos that have rolled their tides over me. I shall never see another such day. I have carried my heart in my mouth for twenty-four hours.73

  A spectral figure confronted him, as if to validate his mood: Tom Nash, who as a boy had fallen through the ice on the Mississippi while skating with Sammy some forty years in the past, and lost his hearing and speech in the ensuing illness. Nash approached him, “& hands me this letter, & wrings my hand, & gives me a devouring look or two, & walks shyly away.”74 This letter has never been recovered.

  The following night, Mark Twain and Cable dashed off the train at Keokuk and hurried through a snowstorm to the opera house only minutes before their scheduled appearance. Mark Twain was at the top of his form; many in the audience “almost fell from their seats,” in the words of one reporter.75 Afterward, Mark Twain searched the diminishing crowd until he spotted a silver-haired woman sitting at the rear of the auditorium with some relatives and friends. Jane Clemens, eighty-one now, had been living in Keokuk with Orion and Mollie for two years. A local newspaper reporter eavesdropped on the reunion.

  “Why, Sam, I didn’t know you,” was the mother’s greeting as he gave her a kiss and a hug.

  “That’s because I’m getting so good-looking,” was the reply as he re-performed the bear act.76

  “A beautiful evening with ma & she is her old beautiful self; a nature of pure gold,” he wrote, “—one of the purest & finest & highest this land has produced…What books she could have written!—& now the world has lost them.”77

  Sam Clemens returned to the Hartford house by an afternoon train on Sunday, March 1, to be greeted by Livy and three flustered daughters. The girls had planned to surprise him with a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, adapted for the household stage by Livy. They had planned a Monday-evening premiere at the Warner house next door, with Susy, nearly thirteen now, as the Prince and young Margaret Warner as the Pauper. Arriving a day earlier than he’d announced, Sam caught the cast still in the process of sewing plumes and buckles onto the costume. Susy recorded the spur-of-the-moment subterfuge, working in a pun that was either accidental or surreally contrived. After hustling their father into the library,

  Clara and I sat with papa a while so as to prevent his being surprised of our seemingly uncalled for disertion of him. But soon we too had to withdraw to the mahogany room…Papa was left all alone; Except that one of us every once in a while would slipp in and stay with him a little while. Any one but papa would have wondered at mammas unwonted absence, but papa is to absence minded, he very seldom notices things as accurately as other people do…78

  Opening Night at the Warners’ was boffo, and future performances were planned.

  THE TOUR behind him at last, Clemens turned his attention briefly to the Concord Library’s attack on Huckleberry Finn, but agreed with Howells that a direct response would seem like overkill. He resumed his fitful crusade for protection of the printed word by joining Howells and others in an author’s reading at Madison Square Theater in late April to benefit the American Copyright League. His overriding preoccupations, however, were his family, the prospects for The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and the rapidly failing health of the former general and president.

  All that, plus his ongoing dreams of mental telegraphy. And his daydreams of new Tom and Huck adventures.

  And his pipe-dreams of the Paige typesetting machine.

  GRANT, GRAY and ravaged under his stocking-cap, toiled at his memoirs in New York, aware tha
t he was in a race with death to finish his book. On April 29, as Grant was dictating the details of the Appomattox campaign,79 the New York World published a cruel article charging that the general was using a ghostwriter: namely his aide and former chronicler, Adam Badeau. The World had treated Grant badly in the past. An infuriated Twain launched a campaign to smoke out the source of this libel, calling on all his friends at the newspapers to help him. The trail led directly to Badeau. The ex-officer, as it turned out, was building a clumsy case for a greater share of the riches the book was now certain to bring in. He had gone so far as to write a letter to his employer that demanded a doubling of his salary and hinted that he would denounce Grant as a fraud if he didn’t get it.

  Badeau, who had served under Grant, and written about Grant’s generalship, nonetheless seems to have been the last man in America to miss the point about Grant’s tenacity. Grant—what was left of him—faced Badeau down. He blistered the man in a bluff-calling letter of reprimand, reminding Badeau of some shadows in his military past and in essence defying this would-be blackmailer to carry through. Badeau backed off—and soon became the suspected source of a rumor that Grant’s memoirs had been written by Mark Twain.80

  Samuel Clemens visited the general on the day the World article was published (neither he nor Grant yet knew of it). He brought Susy with him, and she recorded the visit.

  Papa went up into Gen. Grant’s room, and he took me with him, and I felt greatly honored and delighted when papa took me into Gen. Grant’s room…Gen. Grant is a man I shall be glad all my life that I have seen. Papa and Gen. Grant had a long talk together…81

  It was part of a work-in-progress by Susy, who had just turned thirteen.