Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
By Andrew Hoffman
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
1997, 572 pp., $49.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Mark Twain is often regarded as a simple humorist and writer of children's books about growing up along the Mississippi River in the 1840s. For someone who was born and died in a Halley's Comet year (1835 and 1910 respectively), much more could be expected, however, and Mark Twain blazed a path of socially critical literary humour that lit up the whole world.
Hoffman's biography of Samuel Clemens, who adopted "Mark Twain" as his pseudonym, attempts to cover the development of a man, raised in a slave-owning family in a racist south, who gradually grew out of his prejudices to become a fervent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, a supporter of women's suffrage and trade unions, and a barbed critic of monarchy, Church, imperialism and the "soft-handed and idle" capitalists of the world. It is easy to understand why his vast working-class readership made him into one of America's most popular writers ever.
Clemens' growth was a slow process of learning and experience. The American Civil War, and its central issue of slavery, passed the young Clemens by. It ended his career as a river-boat pilot and, after a three-week stint in a Confederate militia, Clemens decamped to seek his fortune in the state of Nevada where he lived the hard-drinking, hard-gambling life of a frontier state of the American west.
Writing turned out to be his lifeline, as his business investments and financing of technological inventions failed. Always with a talent for humour, he increasingly explored social and political concerns. His early novel, The Gilded Age (1873), with its vigorous criticism of political corruption by big capital, shook up a drowsy literary scene.
As much as Clemens blamed politicians and state officials who were "for sale or rent on the mildest possible terms", he also blamed the election of corrupt politicians on an uneducated populace, arguing that full suffrage was unwise because voters were unwise. By his later years, however, he had become an advocate of universal suffrage and had redeemed his past as an outspoken opponent of women's suffrage.
A ruthless renovation of Clemens' early attitude to slavery, and his moral dereliction during the Civil War, was also in store. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) deals with the moral awakening of Huck from seeing blacks as property to regarding them as equal human beings and, quite subversive for its time, the novel portrays Jim, Huck's friend and runaway slave, as a noble, kind and admirable hero. Banned by the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts as "trash and only suitable for the slums", Twain's novel stands tall as a challenge to slavery and racism.
Despite the personal trappings of wealth, (the successful Clemens counted amongst his friends millionaires and oil tycoons whilst heading a household with "six servants, private tutors and travel on a grand scale"), Clemens continued to radicalise. A pulse of radical democracy charged his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where sixth century monarchy and all hierarchical political systems are given a resounding political thrashing at the hands of the democratic Yankee who supports hot-blooded revolution instead of "goody-goody talk and moral suasion".
Not only the kings and barons of royalty but also the kings of the dollar, the new breed of extremely ruthless robber barons, were scorned by Clemens whilst he praised trade unions as the guarantor of "democratic America". True, Clemens had to wrestle with the personal contradiction created by his investment in a labour-saving typesetting machine which would have thrown 50,000 compositors out of work. However the problem of labour-saving devices adding to unemployment rather than quality of life and leisure was not the personal fault of Clemens but rather that of capitalism.
Clemens also became a noted critic of imperialism. After a brief period as a "red-hot imperialist" (advocating the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1866), he turned his satire against the colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples, celebrating the resistance of Tasmanian Aborigines and Maoris. He became a trenchant opponent of England during the Boer War, the US invasion of the Philippines ("her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies"), and the Belgian king's reign of blood in the Congo.
Whilst Clemens' radicalism is well documented, and whilst he wrote all sorts of earth-shattering stuff in private, he did, as Gore Vidal notes, restrict or modify his public utterances and, with a market to protect, withheld much of his more incendiary material from publication.
Paradox marked Clemens throughout his life, despite his growth towards radicalism. The more evils Clemens saw and denounced, the more pessimistic he became. As he grew older he became more cynical about the ability of people to resist and conquer a new world, more misanthropic about the sorry state of a humanity that could tolerate such evils, and more inclined to blame people for submitting to tyranny. Disgusted by the Russian Tsar, and despairing of the Russian masses' passivity, for example, he advocated assassination of the Tsar. This was an outlook produced by his frustration for change — as his friend Helen Keller said, Clemens would "work himself up into a frenzy over what he saw as dull acquiescence in any evil that could be remedied".
Clemens' political vagaries and paradoxes were a product of his illusions in a democratic capitalism. Clemens, the supporter of labour, was also a businessman, and whilst he targeted the glaring injustices and vulgarities that grow out of capitalism, his criticism usually stopped short of the fundamentals of capitalism itself. He was opposed to the declining business standards of the robber barons, and the ugly face of imperialism and racism, but not to the profit principle as such.
Clemens did not, however, fall prey to the illusions of the utopian socialists who saw the capitalist class being rationally and peacefully persuaded into supporting a cooperative society. Clemens saw the necessity of class struggle and, if necessary, the spilling of blood and revolution (at least in the struggle against monarchy), for achieving change.
Though the means were revolutionary enough, however, the end was just as utopian — a democratic capitalism, rather than a democratic socialism. Clemens saw 1900s Australia as "the modern heaven — it is bossed absolutely by the workingmen". South Australia was "paradise" itself — the worker's vote "is the desire of the politician — indeed it is the very breath of the politician's being; the parliament exists to deliver the will of the workingman."
Don't, however, look to Hoffman's biography to learn much about all this. Hoffman deals with Clemens' intellectual, moral and political discoveries and tensions in the odd paragraph casually dispensed amongst mountains of detail and trivia. This is like a biography of Marx which makes occasional reference to Marx's interest in the inherent contradictions of the capitalist economic system amidst masses of detail about his domestic life with Jenny and the kids, and his carbuncles.
This biography of Clemens is part of the carbuncle school of biography (and Clemens' carbuncle does indeed make an appearance). One can't, however, know Clemens the man and writer unless one knows his ideas and, as Clemens' friend and critic William Howells put it, "he who leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectation and pretence, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, will come infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain". Better to read some Mark Twain classics, or to explore his lesser known works. That will be time well spent in the company of a great writer who, with "a pen warmed up in hell", wrote about, and deeply cared for, a more human future.