Creators (23 page)

The events of 1848–1851 were the pivot of Hugo’s life, though they were in control of him, rather than the other way around. There were appalling scenes of radical violence in Paris during 1848, which shook Hugo’s newfound radicalism; and when Louis-Napoléon came to the fore, Hugo supported him and entered the new legislature as a Bonapartist. But though Louis-Napoléon, on forming a government, offered Hugo an office, it was not the senior office he felt he deserved, and he declined it in disgust. Thereafter, he became increasingly hostile, and when Louis-Napoléon staged a coup d’état in 1851, which as usual took him by surprise, he passed into open and violent
opposition, taking refuge first in Belgium, then in the British Channel Islands—Jersey in 1853, Guernsey from 1855 on. Both his wife, Adèle, and his mistress Juliette shared this self-imposed exile for two decades. In some ways exile suited Hugo. He created a medieval universe of his own at Hauteville House, as he called his mansion, writing and surveying the world from his top-story aerie; writing poems and pamphlets denouncing “Napoléon le Petit,” as he called the emperor; and enjoying the wild coast and sea, which he drew endlessly in pen and wash and portrayed in his great novel
Les Travailleurs de la Mer
. He always predicted that Louis-Napoléon’s regime would end in a debacle, as indeed it did in 1870. But then everyone could see that, and the end came as a result of the emperor’s pursuing precisely the vainglorious nationalist courses which Hugo himself had periodically urged, and which were now beyond France’s power. Nonetheless, Hugo was able to return to Paris in 1871 vindicated, a national hero, and was again elected to the parliament, though his speeches made no sense. His books continued to sell in vast numbers, promoted by a huge publicity machine in which Hugo took the closest interest, and he effortlessly assumed what he (and others) took to be his natural position as
doyen de la littérature française
.

Moreover, after all his oscillations around the monarchical traditions in France, he ended up as the embodiment of republicanism, so that his death in 1885 was a national event and his funeral a public ceremony recalling
le retour des cendres.
Hugo had planned it well in advance, and it was (in a sense) the final statement of his philosophy of a double standard and having things both ways. In his will, he appointed the president of the republic, Jules Grévy; the president of the senate, Léon Soy; and the president of the chamber of deputies, Léon Gambetta, as his three executors. His deathbed was a long-drawn-out drama. He let it be known that he believed in God. The archbishop of Paris foolishly offered to give him the last rites. Hugo, having toyed with the idea for a few days, finally declared himself a secular figure, and arranged to be buried in the Panthéon, a reconsecrated church which had to be specially deconsecrated again, by a hastily passed parliamentary statute, in order to receive his secular coffin. On the night of 19–20 May 1885, Hugo
gave a virtuoso performance as a dying cultural giant, speaking phrases in French, translating them into Latin, then into Spanish. He uttered alexandrines such as “C’est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit”—grand but empty of meaning. He had accepted the government’s offer of a state funeral on the grandest possible scale but insisted that the actual coffin and hearse should be of the type provided for paupers—a peculiar proviso, since Hugo had been a millionaire for a long time and had guarded his money with anxious care. The turnout for the funeral was enormous, a million or more, and Edmond de Goncourt recorded that the police told him that all the brothels were closed and draped in black crepe as a mark of respect (appropriately, since Hugo had been one of their best customers), though the night before, while Hugo’s body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, the girls had been hard at work in the surrounding crowds. The pauper’s hearse raised some eyebrows even among those long inured to Hugo’s double standard. Ford Madox Ford, an eyewitness, wrote that it was “like a blackened packing case drawn by two spavined horses…an inconceivable shock effect of grinning hypocrisy.” There followed eleven carriages full of flowers. Several people were killed during the funeral, and a woman gave birth. People remembered it as a later generation would remember the day Kennedy was assassinated.
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Ford’s remarks were typical of the mixed feelings with which the English reacted to Hugo as a phenomenon. Tennyson, almost as famous in England as Hugo was in France, called him a “weird titan.” He was “an unequal genius [and] reminds one that there is only one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.” (This, oddly, recalled Bonaparte’s comment on the retreat from Moscow.) In 1877 Tennyson wrote a sonnet in Hugo’s honor (“Victor in Poesy, Victor in Romance”), and sent it to the old man, who replied: “How could I not love England, when she produces men like yourself.” Thackeray read Hugo’s book on the Rhine and noted: “He is very great and writes like God almighty.” But later, seeing Hugo in a Parisian church, Thackeray dismissed him as a “queer heathen.”
¹⁶

Dickens was impressed both by Hugo himself and by Hugo’s apartment in the Place Royale: “the most fantastic apartment and
stood in the midst of it, a little, fine-featured, fiery-eyed fellow.” It was

It is illuminating to compare Dickens with Hugo. Dickens is the English equivalent, as close as one can get: a tireless romantic, fertile in invention, loving strange tales and brilliant at telling them; a descriptive writer of pure genius, never at a loss for words; a lover of mysteries, ancient nooks and corners, and human peculiarities. Yet what a difference! It is the difference between France and England. The marvelous Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters, in a dozen volumes and profusely annotated, allows us at last to see the man, fully and in all his activities (save one: his relations with Ellen Ternan, still, and perhaps forever, shrouded in mystery). Both men were creators on the largest possible scale. But in all else they differed. Where Hugo was a bombastic orator and noisy politician who sat in parliament under three regimes, Dickens flatly refused repeated invitations to enter the House of Commons, and confined his public activities to practical projects such as running a hostel for fallen women and shipping them out to Australia. Where Hugo was mean and miserly, Dickens was profuse and generous. Where Hugo was a thunderous nationalist and noisy jingo, Dickens deplored the
Crimean War, loathed politicians like Palmerston, and always sought peaceful ways out of international disputes. Hugo shouted about injustice in general, but Dickens actually worked hard to remedy it in particular instances. His letters show a hardworking life of dedication and courage and are punctuated by endless kindnesses to all. Hugo, by contrast, appears vainglorious, selfish, and totally absorbed in his own egotism. He is also unconsciously comic, with a sinister twist to his buffoonery. Both men treated their wives badly, and both had salient weaknesses of character, together with much strength of will. But whereas greater knowledge of Dickens’s works and life makes one warm to him, with Hugo the same process repels one more and more. Which was the greater creative artist? Impossible to judge.

M
ARK
T
WAIN
,
or, to give him his real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), stands at the center of American literature. Indeed he may be said to have invented it. All earlier writers who achieved prominence in the United States, such as Washington Irving (1783–1859), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), to name the quartet who dominated transatlantic letters in the first half of the nineteenth century, were very much part of the English tradition and suffered in varying degrees from what was later to be called “cultural cringe.” It is true that James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) used an American background, from 1826 on, in his celebrated Leatherstocking stories of backwoods Indians and the scout Natty Bumppo. These stories were read all over the world and had a perceptible effect on European migration to the United States. But Cooper was, in all essentials, a follower of Sir Walter Scott, writing traditional romantic adventures in an American vernacular, and in all his voluminous works he was always looking over his shoulder at English models. Moreover, Cooper was a writer of such grotesque ineptitude, as Twain himself pointed out in his essays “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and “Further Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper,” that he scarcely merits membership in any artistic canon, however meager.
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By contrast, Twain was not only a great creative artist but a quintessential American artist from first to last. His material was
American, even though he garnered or stole much of it from all over the world; his style (if that is the right word) was American, as were his vocabulary, verbal accent, ideological humor, comedy, indignation real or stimulated, self-presentation, methods of literary commerce, and journalistic flair. He was an American opportunist, an American plagiarist, an American braggart and egoist, and an American literary phenomenon. Once and for all he liberated American letters from its slavelike cringe and taught American writers, and public performers of all kinds, a completely new set of tricks, which have been in use ever since. His creativity was often crude and nearly always shameless. But it was huge and genuine, overpowering indeed, a kind of vulgar magic, making something out of nothing, then transforming that mere something into entire books, which in turn hardened into traditions and cultural certitudes. He was the greatest of all literary con men, and the joy he derived from conning his audience—a joy which was greedy, bitter, contemptuous, and exultant all at once—was an essential part of his creative spirit.
²

America was a big new country, initially inhabited chiefly by people who came from a small old one. As they penetrated America’s vastness and discovered something about its amazing characteristics, they began to relate and embroider what they had seen, for each other and for those who had not gotten quite so far. They did so sitting around campfires and primitive stoves in tents, wooden cabins, and the stores that served instead of the inns and coffeehouses of their country of origin. They had genuine tales to tell which became taller in the telling and retelling, and the relish of these tales lay not so much in their veracity and verisimilitude but in the audacity with which they were told, and the gravitas and sincerity of the tellers. It was a new art form, or rather a revival of the ancient art of the sagas and Nibelungenlied the Germans and Nordic races had created before they became literate. But it was a revival with a difference, because it grew up alongside or on the frontiers of a sophisticated, literate, modern society, and it called for a modern Homer to set it down. Twain was that man.

Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal in the same state, on the immense, complex, muddy river that provided so much material for the tales he heard as a boy.
³
He
became in time a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a volunteer soldier, a miner in the Nevada silver rush, and eventually a journalist. These activities took him all over the American midwest and west, where pioneering was still the norm and the moving frontier a fact of life. In much of this semi-tamed country there was nothing to do at night, so the storyteller was king. In his childhood by the Mississippi, his adolescence, and his early manhood, Twain was exposed to the art of rustic or pioneering narrators and yearned to emulate them, just as he longed to be a river pilot (as he tells us in
Life on the Mississippi
). And, just as he eventually became a pilot, so he became, by stages, a master storyteller, and remained one for the rest of his life.

Twain not only heard stories and told them in turn but also thought deeply on the matter. In time, he wrote an essay, “How to Tell a Story,” the lead item in a collection he published in 1896. It begins:

He adds that only one kind of story is difficult, the humorous story; and that the humorous story is American, the comic story is English, and the witty story is French. Crime stories and witty stories depend for their effect on the matter. But the humorous story succeeds or fails by the manner of its telling.
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Here we begin to come close to the essence of Mark Twain, and the hub of his creativity. He learned how to tell a story by listening to verbal masters of the art, around campfires, in wooden huts, and in stores and bars. Then he transformed this knowledge into print. Twain was not, strictly speaking, a novelist, philosopher, seer, or travel writer, though he was a bit of all of these. Essentially he was a teller of stories. And he was a great storyteller—a teller of genius—because he was ruthless. Twain grasped, even as a child, the essential immorality of storytelling. A man telling a tale is not under oath. He may insist, indeed he must insist, that his story is true. But this does not mean that it
is true, or that it needs to be. The storyteller’s audience may expect him to proclaim his veracity because that is one of the conventions of the art. But what the readers or listeners actually want from him is not verisimilitude or authenticity but entertainment and laughter. They know it. He knows it. When he says, “What I am going to tell you is strictly true,” he is merely pronouncing a formula of the genre like “Once upon a time.” A storyteller is a licensed liar, though he must never say so. When Twain was presented with Thomas Carlyle’s assertion: “The truth will always out at last,” he replied: “That’s because he did not know how to lie properly.” The word “properly” is important. There are conventions in the lying of storytelling. Twain was sensitive on the point. Indeed that is why he adopted a pseudonym. As Sam Clemens he was bound to the truth by his conscience, like every other well-brought-up American who believed (or pretended to believe) the story about Washington and the cherry tree—which itself was a lie, invented by Parson Weems (who was himself not a parson but a Bible salesman). But as Mark Twain he was a licensed storyteller, and so could lie in the cause of art. Actually, there was a double dishonesty in the pseudonym. The river call “Mark Twain,” meaning a depth of two fathoms, was not the invented nom de plume of Sam Clemens. He pinched it from another former pilot turned writer called Isaiah Sellers, who had used it in the
New Orleans Picayune
. Clemens savaged this man so severely in a rival paper, the
New Orleans True Delta
, that Sellers gave up writing in disgust, and Clemens took over his moniker.
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This was in 1863, and two years later Twain (as he now was) published a sketch in the
New York Saturday Press
, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” This tale (which became the lead item of Twain’s first book in 1867) was momentous in attracting nationwide attention to the teller, and thereafter Twain never lacked celebrity or an audience. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” is the absolute essence of Twain as a writer and an operator—nothing else in his career is so quintessential. To begin with, he did not hear it, as he originally claimed, told by an old pioneer by a campfire in California. It was an old folktale (so he later said) with distant origins in ancient Greece, and had
been around a long time even in the United States. Indeed, in California it had reached print at least as early as 1853, when Clemens was eighteen—and long before he got to the west coast. How he first really heard (or read) the tale is undiscoverable. He presumably invented the names of the frog, Dan’l Webster, and the frog’s owner, Jim Smiley. He later insisted that the episode occurred in Calaveras County in spring 1849, during the gold rush, Smiley being a “forty-niner.” He also insisted: “I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them, but as a thing they had witnessed and would remember.” This may be true. But Twain added: “The miner who told the story in my hearing that day in the fall of 1865…saw no humor in his tale, neither did his listeners; neither he nor they even smiled or laughed; in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference.” Twain said they were interested in only two facts: “One was the smartness of its hero, Jim Smiley, in taking the stranger in with a loaded frog; and the other was Smiley’s deep knowledge of a frog’s nature—for he knew (as the narrator asserted and the listener conceded) that a frog likes shot and is always ready to eat it.” Now here Twain is embarking on an inverted form of the story. Smiley did not take in the stranger. The stranger took in Smiley. And Smiley did not know the frog liked shot—the stranger fed it with shot. Indeed there is no evidence from the original story that frogs like shot; on the contrary, Dan’l Webster must have disliked shot intensely after his horrible experience of being unable to jump.
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The truth is, Twain was making his story serve a second, a third, and even a fourth turn. Having first sold the story several times in the 1860s, he tells it again in the 1890s, first giving the Greek version, “The Athenian and the Frog,” from Sidgwick’s
Greek Prose Composition,
then repeating the Californian version about Smiley, which he had invented or plagiarized. Then he has the nerve to give a third version, a retranslation of a French version translated from his own original text by “Madame Blanc” and published in
Revue des Deux Mondes.
As his retranslation was literal, it is very funny, and it gives Twain the opportunity to give the reader a lecture on the chaotic confusion of the French language. I suspect he did this trick with a German version too, for
Twain was very critical of the German propensity to put together huge words, and got a lot of laughs on this score in his travel books. Later, Twain admitted that the Greek original of the story was an invention itself. Sidgwick, with Twain’s permission, had simply translated Twain’s Californian story into classical Greek, changing quail shot to stones, making Jim a Boethian, turning the stranger into an Athenian, and calling the result “The Athenian and the Frog.” So all Twain’s huffing and puffing about the amazing coincidence was just showmanship.

What all this proves is that Twain was a canny professional humorist. He understood the economics of humor, and how, once you have a funny idea—a champion jumping frog that cannot move because it is loaded with shot—you can use it, with suitable variation, again and again. Twain told a version of the frog story in private conversation among admiring friends. And he often told it from the platform during his many lecture tours—for another of his professional gifts was his ability to recognize a story that could be told as well as read. And it is hard to say when this story is funniest: read or told, or in French, German, English, or Greek. In Twain’s written version the language is mining-camp Californian of the 1840s. But the tale can equally well be told in Mississippi “darky” or Missouri “Doric,” or, for that matter, New England demotic.
⁷

With the frog story Twain stumbled, almost by chance, on what twentieth-century comedians called the running gag—that is, a joke which can be made to work again and again in the course of a long story, a book, or a lecture, and actually—if well told and well timed—gets funnier when repeated. Once he realized what a humorous treasure he had found, Twain used the device again and again. The classic example occurs in
Roughing It
, when he takes a dull anecdote about Horace Greeley riding a coach, which is told on a coach and repeated at intervals by everyone who joins the coach. There were a lot of anecdotes told about Greeley, and Twain, with his low cunning, killed them all dead, and in doing so gave himself an easy, funny chapter for his book—another example of the economics of humor.

Running gags are a feature of Twain’s first big success,
The Innocents Abroad
, which describes his first tour of Europe with a
group of Americans. The first edition sold over 100,000 copies and made Twain rich. He subsequently lost most of his money in an ill-starred business manufacturing a patent typesetter, was declared bankrupt, and then redeemed his fortune by a world speaking tour. That tour was recorded in a reprise of
The Innocents Abroad
called
Following the Equator
, the profits from which allowed Twain to repay his creditors in full—another example of his mastery of the economics of writing, since the idea behind both books is essentially the same but the variations are sufficiently numerous and inventive to keep the readers happy.

Twain took to public speaking, both for money and to publicize his books, early in his career as a writer, and his lectures quickly became a major source of income and fame. Indeed it is hard to say whether, in his lifetime, Twain was better known as a writer or a speaker—the two roles were inextricably mingled.
⁸
His lectures were essentially humorous performances; they were dramatic, and he was acting. He came to this life on the coattails of Charles Dickens’s readings, which were attracting enormous audiences all over the United States in the late 1860s, just as Twain was getting going. Dickens read from his books, and so did Twain. But whereas Dickens aimed to draw tears (with his “Death of Little Nell”) or gasps of horror and excitement (with “The End of Bill Sykes”), Twain wanted laughs. He was essentially a stand-up comedian. Raising a laugh was at the heart of his art and his creativity. Twain liked money. He liked the good things in life. He lived well and built two expensive houses, one of which survives and is, in effect, a museum to his genius. But his real reward was laughs. He was a supreme egoist, as great a demander of attention and hero worship, in his own pseudo-modest way, as Victor Hugo or Richard Wagner. And the form of worship he found most congenial—it was the breath of life to him, in private company and in public performance—was the titter, rising to a continuous hooting roar of laughter and reaching a crescendo of uncontrolled mirth, with people “stomping their feet and throwing chairs about,” as he put it. Twain’s entrance, early on, went as follows. He would be behind a curtain, playing the piano. (He did this with some skill; and he was the originator of the western saloon joke, later purloined by Oscar Wilde during
his American tour in the 1880s, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”) When the curtain went up, Twain would be engrossed in his music; then, slowly, he would realize that an audience was awaiting his attention and would stand up and walk to the center of the stage. There would be a long pause, then he would begin to speak.
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