Fame & Folly (27 page)

As it happens, he took in almost none of it; and, though eschewing theology, let himself be taken in by an ancient theological canard: the legacy, via the Judas legend, of the Jew’s affinity for money—the myth of the Rich Jew, the Jew Usurer. The very use of the generic phrase “the Jew” suggests stigma. Mythology, it develops, is the heart and muscle of Mark Twain’s reputedly “philosemitic” essay—the old myths trotted out for an airing in the American idiom. He said he lacked the disposition for slander. It would be wrong to dismiss this statement; but perhaps it would be fairer to suppose that he lacked the disposition for disciplined caution. He knew nothing of Jewish literary or jurisprudential civilization, or of the oceanic intellectual traditions of Jewish biblical commentary; he approached the Joseph tale with the crudity of a belligerent village atheist, and employed it to defame on economic grounds exactly as the charge of deicide defamed on theological grounds.

Yet he was surely capable of renouncing a canard when someone helped him to prise out the truth. The Jew, he had written, “is charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” “You feed on a country,” he accused, “but you don’t like to fight for it.” Nevertheless there is appended, at the end of this essay, a remarkable Postscript: “The Jew as Soldier,” wherein instance after historical instance of Jewish “fidelity” and “gallant soldiership” is cited—in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and especially the Civil War. It is not the admission of canard that is remarkable, but rather the principle drawn from it: “It is not allowable to endorse wandering maxims upon supposition.” That, overall, and despite its contrary motivation, is a precise characterization of “Concerning the Jews”—the endorsement of wandering maxims upon supposition. Only compare
George Eliot’s “The Modern Hep Hep”—a chapter in her
Impressions of Theophrastus Such
, published just twenty years before Mark Twain’s wandering maxims—to see what a generalized essay concerning the Jews, engaging Mark Twain’s own questions, might attain to.

M
ARK
T
WAIN’S
twenty months of residence in Vienna were among his most prolific. The fifteen short works collected in the 1900 edition of
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays
are a fraction of his output during this period; but they reflect the entire arsenal of his art: the occasionally reckless polemic, the derisive irony the intelligent laughter, the verbal stilettoes, the blunt country humor, the fervent despair, the hidden jeer, the relishing of palaver and tall tale, the impatient worldliness, the brilliant forays of language—sometimes for purposes of search-and-destroy, sometimes for a show of pure amazement, sometimes for plain delight in the glory of human oddness; most often for story-telling’s fragile might. Nothing is too trivial, nothing too weighty. And frequently the trivial and the weighty are enmeshed, as in Hadleyburg, when the recitation of a handful of words touches on depths of deceit. Or as in a lightly turned sketch—“My Boyhood Dreams”—that teases such eminences as William Dean Howells and John Hay (U.S. Secretary of State in 1898) with their failure to fulfill their respective childhood ambitions—steamboat mate and auctioneer; never mind that these “ambitions” are wholly of Mark Twain’s antic invention. But even so playful an oddment as this begins with a bitter reference to the humiliated Dreyfus.

In fact, aboard Mark Twain’s prose you cannot very long rely on the “lightly turned”—whatever sets out with an elfin twitch of the nostrils or a Mona Lisa half-smile is likely to end in prophetic thunder. “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It” starts off with a diaper pin and a twinkle, but its real theme is indifference to injustice—“the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.” From slaveholding to Dreyfus is but a paragraph’s leap: “From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France … lay
under the smother of the silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and unoffending man.” And from Dreyfus how far is it to the “silent National Lie,” “whole races and peoples conspir[ing] to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and sham”? Beware Mark Twain when his subject looks most severely simple or mild-manneredly innocent: you may speedily find yourself aflame in a fiery furnace of moral indignation.

Sketches, fables, diatribes. Eight months before his death in 1910 he wrote, “I am full of malice, saturated with malignity.” More than two decades earlier he had exclaimed to Howells that his was “a pen warmed up in hell.” Yet—with relative benignity—the remainder of this volume treats of artists who are ignored while alive and valued only posthumously (“Is He Living or Is He Dead?”); of a train companion determined to set right every minor annoyance (“Travelling with a Reformer”); and of a celebrated inventor ordered by the Austrian government to teach grade school (“The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again”). But that is scarcely the finish of it—there are other exuberances. “The Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” not only supplies an ancient Greek version of the joke, but bursts into a spoof of word-for-word translation from the French. “How to Tell a Story” will remind readers of nighttime ghost-scares at summer camp, while “The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance”—an unrestrained comic lecture on the relative nature of wealth—would hardly pass muster in a contemporary multiculturalist classroom. “About Play-Acting” compares a serious drama in Vienna with the frivolous offerings cut from the New York theater advertisements of Saturday, May 7, 1898; Broadway at this hour (despite spectacular technical advances) is not a whit more substantive or sophisticated. “At the Appetite Cure,” with its praise of starvation as the key to health, reflects Mark Twain’s own belief in the curative virtues of abstinence from food—a crank piece; but here the jokes are crude and cruel, with a Teutonic edge of near-sadism. All the same, the most stirring—the most startling—real-life narrative in this volume, “My Debut as a Literary Person,” concerns starvation; in extremis, at sea, in a small boat, after a shipwreck. Mark Twain defines it in
a minor way as a journalistic scoop, but for power, passion, character, and suspense, it belongs among his masterworks.

All these romances—some as slight as skits, and one as rich and urgent as a novel—were set down in Mark Twain’s Vienna: a cosmopolis driven by early modernism, saturated in music and theater, populated by gargantuan cultural figures whose influence still shakes the world (Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, to mention only these), ruled by rogues (two of Hitler’s idols among them), on occasion ruled by mobs; a society gaudily brilliant, acutely civilized, triumphantly flourishing, and also shameless, brutal. Part heaven, part the devil’s precinct. An odd backdrop for a writer reared in Hannibal, Missouri. But in Vienna Mark Twain was close to the peak of what he called his “malignity,” and Vienna served him.

Along with Dreyfus in Paris, it gave him a pen warmed up in the local hell.

SAUL BELLOW’S BROADWAY
 

T
HIS IS
Saul Bellow’s “Broadway uptown” in the middle of the twentieth century. “The carnival of the street,” he called it, “the dust going round like a woman on stilts.” Four and a half decades on, the Upper West Side (roughly from the Seventies all the
way up to Columbia University on 116th Street) still clings to Broadway’s pouring, pressing, teeming wadi, and the dizzying dust, though descended from its stilts, still goes round and round, crawling into your nostrils and stippling its egalitarian stucco over every race and kind. The fruit stores are still there, run by Koreans. The inexhaustible current of voices is still there, though you are less likely to hear remnants of Yiddish and more likely to hear torrents of Spanish, in dialects up from the Caribbean, from Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, even Mexico. The elderly ladies are still there in the coffee shops, “rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and [they] used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age,” and though they still take you in with their youth-ravenous painted stares, the blue hair is as out-of-date as the butcher shop sawdust, and their old New York faces compete now with the Inca faces from the side-street tenements and the lost faces of the homeless on their shreds of blankets. The butcher shops, meanwhile, have mostly been swallowed up by the supermarket chains. And the “cafeteria with the gilded front” is gone.

All the same, Bellow’s Broadway uptown—
Seize the Day
was first published in 1956—is nearly intact: the hurrying anonymous lives, the choked and throbbing urban air, the heavy sunlight that makes you “feel like a drunkard.” Re-entering the theater of this short novel after more than forty years, you will find the scenery hardly altered.

What
has
altered is the cultural scenery, so to speak, outside the novel.

In 1953, Bellow’s
The Adventures of Augie March
struck out on a course so independent from the tide of American fiction that no literary lessons could flow from it: it left no wake, and cut a channel so entirely idiosyncratic as to be uncopyable. Much earlier, Ernest Hemingway had engineered another radical divergence in the prose of the novel: having inherited the stylistic burden of the nineteenth century, with its elaborate “painting” of interiors and landscapes, its obligatory omniscience, and its essaylike moralizing, he mopped up the excess moisture (“clotting the curds,” he
called it) and lopped subordinate clauses and chopped dialogue and left little of the old forest of letters standing. An army of succinctness-seekers followed in a movement that accommodated two or three generations of imitators, until finally the distinctive Hemingway dryness flaked off into lifeless desiccation. The Hemingway sentence became a kind of ancestral portrait on the wall, and died of too many descendants.
Augie March
, by contrast (though it had its own ancestors, not so much in style as in character), was in itself too fecund to produce epigones or copyists or offspring—as if every source and resource of procreation were already contained in, or used up by, its own internal energies.

Though a generation apart, both prose revolutions, one much-imitated, the other mimic-proof, were surrounded by an alert and welcoming system. The system was, simply, the idea of the novel as urgent and necessary, as a ubiquitous expectation of life, and it is only in retrospect that we are led to call it a system; once it was as manifest as the kitchen table, on which a novel often lay. Yet it was a system even then, though as little noted as the circulation of the blood: it was the air, it was being itself—an organization of those elements intended, as Bellow said in his 1976 Nobel speech, “to represent mankind adequately.” Under that system the novel was looked to; it was awaited. Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
(itself charged with being imitation Hemingway) took up a whole issue of
Life
magazine, which was to the early Fifties what television later became.

In a 1991 interview, Bellow described those old habits and sensations as the outer system penetrating the inner: “Literature in my early days was still something you lived by; you absorbed it, you took it into your system. Not as a connoisseur, aesthete, lover of literature. No, it was something on which you formed your life, which you ingested so that it became part of your substance, your path to liberation and full freedom.” He went on, “I think the mood of enthusiasm and love for literature, widespread in the twenties, began to evaporate in the thirties.”