The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that "heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness and priggishness of his own entourage? I should go even further, I should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years—it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions—but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he "detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model.

We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were together on a lecture tour?—"You will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them—they have found a hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors—after Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot—were Pepys, Suetonius and Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely "spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is Man?"—"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: "Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men—and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually praising their "unrestrained frankness."

And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity—the waste of a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that are current in every New York publishing house?

In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the outré, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the texture of Mark Twain's writings.

For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"—a compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia of his soul.

Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our very eyes.

Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of "wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him.

Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement—a calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead—which there hadn't—this revelation removed that doubt for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius—a genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets generally get at home—for here they don't give shucks for his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory—hey, Dave, ain't it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures Pudd'nhead out-manœuvring the village folk and triumphing over them in the end.

Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community—of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it—it was these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to recognize its divinity?