The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan.
Doubleday, 2003, 736 pages.

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Pained Twain

by Timothy Sandefur

Mark Twain is the only writer who deserves the mountains of superlatives your high school English teacher heaped upon him. His writing is fresh, vivid, subtle, and sharp after more than a century, and his insight into human nature remains profound and often moving.

Fred Kaplan's biography is the first full-length life of the great writer in recent memory. Justin Kaplan (no relation, apparently) won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1966 "Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain," but that book intentionally skipped over much of Twain's early life, since Twain "was always his own biographer, and the books he wrote about these years are incomparably the best possible accounts, even if they may not always be the truest." Ron Powers' 1999 "Dangerous Water," by contrast, focused primarily on Twain's early years, and produced a fascinating short book with intriguing insights into the writer's motivations. Unfortunately, despite its comprehensiveness, "The Singular Mark Twain" lacks the liveliness and insight of these earlier works.

Twain was haunted by many ghosts — the Paige Typesetter which twisted him through bankruptcy over the course of 15 years; the guilt he felt for the deaths of his young son, his daughter Susy, and his wife Livy; the nightmares of violent destruction on the river, or of the incineration of the town drunk when the jail burned down (Twain had given him the matches). These ghosts manifested themselves in various ways — particularly in his obsession with images of lost innocence, like the Adam and Eve story, which he told and retold countless times. His idealistic representation of childhood in "Tom Sawyer" essentially created the popular image of American boyhood. But like the steamboat wrecking Huck's raft, there was a darker element touching all of Twain's work, and which would eventually produce such heart-wrenching works as "The Death of Jean," an essay he wrote within hours of discovering his daughter drowned in the bathtub on Christmas Eve.

His melancholy over the loss of innocence is reflected in his repeated invocation of the idea that ignorance is bliss. In "A Tramp Abroad," he complained that "We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into the matter." Again, in "Life on The Mississippi," he grumbled that learning to read the Mississippi River's features destroyed its beauty: "Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease . . . ? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?" Twain, who was always fascinated by technology, nevertheless saw it as tremendously destructive, and some of his ruminations on the subject are as pessimistic as "The Education of Henry Adams." As Fred Kaplan writes, Twain "was to maintain his popular image, the humorously satiric and genially avuncular embodiment of America's nostalgia for small-town life, the Norman Rockwell of American prose. Later, [William Dean] Howells was to call him, memorably, 'The Lincoln of our Literature,' which he is, suggesting that he also embodies the darker, tragic strains of American experience, though it also implies that, like Lincoln, he provided in his prose a redemptive vision, an optimism earned through painful experience. But, in fact, he is also the anti-Lincoln of our literature, who looked unflinchingly, for himself though not for his public, mostly in unpublished works, at the nasty underside of American and of human life in general: its brevity, selfishness and meaninglessness, its hypocritical religiosity, and its devotion to mammon. All human life, Twain concluded, begins with false hope and inevitably imposes loss and pain. No redemption of any kind inheres in its random nature."

What could make such a writer worth reading? Twain's magnificent skill in capturing the essence of the bright as well as the dark sides of life. When roused on a subject, as in his killer book review "In Defense of Harriet Shelley," Twain is a master warrior, starting slowly and steadily boiling to explosive pressure. When recalling the sweetness of life, as in his autobiography (his unfinished masterpiece), he bests any poet for soothing expression. And when telling an anecdote, like "Jim Wolfe And The Cats" or "Jim Blaine's Old Ram," his comic timing and subtlety are perfect. Twain was a high idealist, often a crusader, as in his real masterpiece on race relations, "Pudd'nhead Wilson." But as an idealist, he was also often disappointed that mere human beings — including often himself — failed to live up to his hopes. And when that happened, his disappointment was bitter, even shattering; it hit him with the force of eating the apple in Eden. As Powers notes, Twain was always just what his wife called him as her term of endearment: "Youth." He could lie without guile and carry a grudge like a war-wound; he could make mere fools into fantastic monsters, and good men into gods, in his mind.

Fred Kaplan's biography manages to capture some of Twain's personal force — particularly his capacity to demonize perfectly innocent people. One of these may have been Isabel Lyon, a longtime friend and companion whom a paranoiac aged Twain later called "a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction & always getting disappointed." Scholars, however, still debate to what degree Lyon deserved these epithets, although Kaplan fails to note the fact. There are other discrepancies between Kaplan's version of events and those of other biographers. He repeats, for instance, Twain's claim that he once turned down the opportunity to buy stock in the Bell telephone, even though Justin Kaplan dismisses the story as apocryphal.

Unfortunately, Fred Kaplan is not as adept as Justin Kaplan in evoking the hysteria and eventual gloom that surrounded much of the writer's life. Twain's existence — even in his own eyes — can be described at least as much by reference to sentiment and image as it is to the facts. As the Paige Typesetter came to overshadow the great writer (reducing his output to a single novel in the course of five years, the fascinating "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court") his humor was drawn farther and farther from him as he watched himself descend into Investment Madness. The machine never worked; disappointment fell upon disappointment; only his association with oil magnate Henry Rogers finally rescued his finances. But his addiction to the Typesetter simply would not relent. It is as if the fever of contemplating fantastic riches caused the cold facts to evaporate into steam. Twain later recalled his family's constant faith that their worthless 75,000 acres of Tennessee would one day make them all rich: "It kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years, and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us — dreamers and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year — no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich — these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it."

Many biographers have detected Twain's regret at the Typesetter fiasco in the pages of "Connecticut Yankee," but their interpretations are rather strained. In fact, Twain was remarkably productive in spite of the strains in his personal life. After Susy's death, Twain completed "Following the Equator," and as Fred Kaplan notes, "that he had been able to write a travel book in which grief played no role was testimony to his professionalism and his use of his pen as catharsis." The "Connecticut Yankee" makes only the most distant glances at his Typesetter stress, and Kaplan is to be commended for not following Twain's other biographers in saying otherwise. "Connecticut Yankee" is actually quite interesting from a libertarian perspective, since it is Twain's most sustained commentary on politics. His intense denunciation of theocracy and defense of the right of revolution in particular show his sincere individualism. The apocalyptic conclusion of the book bears a remarkable resemblance to "Atlas Shrugged," with its theme of politically motivated ignorance destroying the technology it could not possibly create. But while Twain was surprisingly well-read, he shared in the Victorian moral philosophy of his era, and his fear of technology compromised some of his convictions. Some passages in "Yankee" and other writings are even tinged with socialist sympathy. When Howells sought Twain's support for labor unions in opposing labor-saving technology, Twain told him that every invention "takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men — & within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million." But at the same time he denounced factory labor, saying that man "is always some man's slave for wages, and does that man's work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work." Howells later recalled that "he never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with 'Looking Backward' and had [Edward] Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the only present help for working-men."

This fascination can be understood only by Twain's extreme capacity for sympathy. Indeed, his contradictions flow from a deeper source than political. His rapturous individualism — symbolized most beautifully in the figure of Huckleberry Finn choosing to defy the moral teachings of his whole society — runs counter to his Victorian social mores on several occasions. His idealization of peasant life and his realism with regard to the Dark Ages; his worship of technology and his fear of its moral and psychological influences; his skepticism toward quacks and his willingness to indulge Christian Science, dream imagery, and other quackery — all clashed severely. But they clashed in a manner characteristic of his country as well as his era. It is often said that Twain's writing is characteristically American in its style and imagery, but it is also characteristically American in its contradictions. Twain's innocence and his skepticism, his idealism and cynicism, his hero-worship and his crusading, reflect a contradictory and vital culture. As Fred Kaplan writes, Twain "had his fingers to the pulsebeat of who we were and are and made that available to us in ways that make it possible to say, as a metaphor, that Mark Twain wrote aspects of America into existence."

That word pulsebeat is unfortunate; "The Singular Mark Twain" bears other similar marks of clumsiness. It contains numerous spelling and grammar errors ("made him more about in the future in his confidences" p. 373) and awkward phrases ("It kept, though, dragging on" 392); ("Twain had many unfilled holes, he was very short of acorns, and the house was huge." 348). More disappointing is that Kaplan fails to put that pulse into his story. For a 736 page book, "The Singular Mark Twain" seems surprisingly empty. The main reason is that Kaplan fails to take up the tool that Twain used so well: emotion. For Twain was a romantic, and for him, memory was at least as much about sentiment as about dates and places. In his "Autobiography" he wrote of his boyhood, "The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. 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 far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying [sic] through the grass — I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumacs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves. . . . "

That is Mark Twain, and his story needs to be told in similar terms. Justin Kaplan and Ron Powers succeed in evoking the deep gloom and the white sunshine of Mark Twain's life and times, and readers interested in finding the elemental Twain should start there.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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