Long Time Leaving (27 page)
Authors: Roy Blount Jr.
“I ain't got to do nothing about the monkey,” she says. “The monkey
live
here.”
I
n Mark Twain's first best-seller,
Innocents Abroad,
a rhapsodic Italian guide exposes him and his traveling companions to a bust of “Christopher Columbo.” The Americans drive the guide to distraction by refusing to be impressed—by professing, in fact, never to have heard of the gentleman. “Which is the bust and which is the pedestal?” they ask (a distinction that needs clarifying with regard to so many works of art), and “Is—is he dead?” Mark Twain himself has been dead now, in the narrowest sense, for over ninety years. He is, if anything, more solidly empedestaled than Columbus. Somehow, though, he is alive and kicking. Having become a Ken Burns television series, Mark Twain stands preserved beside the Civil “War, baseball, and jazz. Among these institutions, he was least in need of mixed-media restoration. He is still fresh.
“I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves,” he said, “until we are dead—and then not until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.” Ralph “Waldo Emerson seemed determined to produce an aphorism in every sentence, and his today are beaded with sweat. Twain's float. Like the best-turned bits of Scripture, his observations (including many that he never in fact made) are quotable by most everyone to most any purpose. He also survives visually, as a distinct white-suited image on the sentimental cultural retina. A great self-marketer he was and still is. His characters and some of his novels are irresistibly, if seldom satisfactorily, adaptable to the screen. His life and his place in history—he discovered a great deal more of America than Columbus did—continue to energize scholars and popular biographers.
But you could strip him down to his words on the page, and he would still be “full of animation,” like the aforementioned Italian guide, who “fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring mattress.” In part this is because Mark Twain was so meticulous in his choice of words. Long before E. E. Cummings described poetic language as “the precision that creates movement,” Mark Twain wrote that the “intensely right word” has an effect that is “physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
Prompt!
Electrically
prompt! The phrase itself is the effect it describes. “My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry,” Mark Twain wrote, “…is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average.” But how many passages of even good poetry can match the pith and savor of Mark Twain's best flights of prose? “Probably there is nothing in the world so suggestive of serene contentment and perfect bliss as the spectacle of a calf chewing a dishrag, but the nearest approach to it is your reedy tenor, standing apart, in sickly attitude, with head thrown back and eyes uplifted to the moon, piping his distressing solo.”
In his day, Mark Twain made Sigmund Freud, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rudyard Kipling laugh and presumably, because he was friendly with them, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the president of Standard Oil. His jokes still make both highly and lowly literate people chuckle and whoop.
And ponder. And protest. His microjokes are impeccable, his macro-jokes enduringly strange, conducive to consternation, open to argument. The prime example is
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
which will not settle down. It continues to be denounced as racist and sanctified as antiracist.
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
by Mark Twain's postbellum neigh-bor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe (who in her dotage would slip up behind him while he was musing and let out “a war whoop”), provided an incisive analysis of the economics and horrors of slavery at a time when that peculiar institution was still legal. Stowe the New England abolitionist had the thing all figured out unimpeachably in then-radical terms, and there her now-archaic contribution sits. Twain grew up in slave society and never got its taint, or the influence of African American culture, out of his system. The rich, bitter joke of bondage in the land of the free, of palpable asymmetrical affection and heartless-ness, persists in
Huckleberry Finn
to be read differently by each reader in every generation so far.
Who, in Mark Twain's works, is the innocent and who the culprit, who the trickster and who the tricked, who the enslaved and who (if anyone) the master? The culture-resistant Americans abroad, or the Europeans they subject to put-ons; the Connecticut Yankee, or King Arthur's Court. Conscience is a villain, Young Satan is a hero, the Almighty is irresponsible, the funniest storytellers are the least humorous people, labor-saving devices are albatrosses, wealth is a boon that leaves its recipients spent.
Mark Twain's involvement in the national and international life of his
time was both ebullient and ambivalent. He was often outspokenly in love with the prospect of easeful death. He seethed and erupted in work that danced and work that plodded, in celebration of what delighted him and to stave off bankruptcy and muddled personal despair. His corpus remains volatile, vulnerable, provocatively unstable—jokes within jokes, which the author himself is not securely in on. The jokes are not entirely gettable, but readers keep trying to get at the heart of them. The heart is a pump that keeps juice going and coming around.
People often ask me what they should read of Mark Twain, aside from
Huckleberry Finn.
I tell them to find one of the many collections of his short humorous pieces. I wrote introductions for two such collections published in the United Kingdom. I'm aware that the second one ends with a phrase I cited in “Fresh Mark,” but what a great phrase it is.
What is so great about Mark Twain? Here, from one of his several accounts of an earthquake in San Francisco:
The Pastor of Starr King's church, the Rev. Mr. Steb-bins, came down out of his pulpit after the first shock and embraced a woman. It was an instance of great presence of mind. Some say the woman was his wife, but I regard the remark as envious and malicious. Upon occasions like this, people who are too much scared to seize upon an offered advantage, are always ready to depreciate the superior judgment and sagacity of those who profited by the opportunity they lost themselves.
Mark Twain wrote that in 1865. I submit that it is still funny. From another of his stories about that earthquake:
A young gentleman who lives in Sacramento Street rushed down stairs and appeared in public with no raiment on save a knit undershirt, which concealed his
person about as much as its tin-foil cap conceals a champagne bottle. He struck an attitude such as a man assumes when he is looking up, expecting danger from above, and bends his arm and holds it aloft to ward off possible missiles—and standing thus he glared fiercely up at the fire-wall of a tall building opposite, from which a few bricks had fallen. Men shouted at him to go in the house, people seized him by the arm and tried to drag him away—even tender-hearted women, (O, Woman! …in our hours of ease uncertain, coy, and hard to please—when anything happens to go wrong with our harness, a ministering angel thou), women, I say, averted their faces, and nudging the paralyzed and impassible statue in the ribs with their elbows beseeched him to take their aprons—to take their shawls—to take their hoop-skirts—anything, anything, so that he would not stand there longer in such a plight and distract people's attention from the earthquake. But he wouldn't budge—he stood there in his naked majesty till the last tremor died away from the earth, and then looked around on the multitude—and stupidly enough, too, until his dull eye fell upon himself. He went back up stairs, then. He went up lively.
Am I going to tell you that Mark Twain is so great because he could in the same breath both mock and sympathize, by virtue of a homespun aestheticism transcending all conventional sentiment, or because he could evoke both stasis and hullabaloo, prudery and lubricity, microcosm and macrocosm, at once, offhandedly? Or am I going to clarify him psychologically in such terms as these (resorted to by a severe academic critic named Guy Cardwell): “By temperament and as a jokester …he had strongly ego-syntonic as well as syntonic tendencies. Jokes are among the devices which make the resulting stresses bearable”?
I am not.
I put it to you simply that the most impressive thing about Mark Twain is, he is still funny.
Aside from his masterpiece,
Huckleberry Finn,
none of Twain's books, taken as a whole, is a triumph of form.
Life on the Mississippi,
magnificent in stretches, is more irregular altogether than the river.
Innocents Abroad
and the other travel books are padded-out congeries of tangents and
digressions.
Puddin'head Wilson
still shows odd traces of what it started out to be, a shaggy-dog tale of Siamese twins. And what makes
Huckleberry Finn
the template of American narrative is not the novel's construction but its voice—an unprecedented, brilliantly seamless
e pluribus unum
of formal English and several varieties of vernacular American. The voice of a humorist coming to grips (inevitably not to everyone's, indeed perhaps not quite to anyone's, complete satisfaction) with the most indigestible matter of American history: slavery. As a whole, this coming-to-grips is problematic. Needs constantly to be reconsidered. Which means we can keep going back to enjoy its parts.
Consider the perfectly straightforward-sounding sentence I quoted earlier. “The Pastor …came down out of his pulpit after the first shock and embraced a woman.” In neither the choice nor the sequence of words is there anything like an elbow in our ribs, but as the period falls into place, do you not share with me
a frisson
of anticipation? We can dip into
Huckleberry Finn
at any point and hear Huck's voice setting us up in the same way again and again.
I wonder, in fact, how often any of Twain's books are read straight through today. It is at the level of sentence, paragraph, observation, episode, and sketch that he is a great and abidingly popular writer. And yet his short humorous pieces usually get short shrift in assessments of his work. He himself, as a young man, deprecated his essential gift: “I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—
i.e.,
humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit …to excite the
laughter
of God's creatures. Poor, pitiful business!”
Comedy is one thing. Aristophanes is still, and even in uninspired translation, great comedy. But there is virtually no such thing as classic humor. Humor almost always travels badly from culture to culture and perishes fast. What writing in English has remained funny on the page, on its own terms, as long as Twain's? Much of Dickens. Bits of Swift and Sterne and Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. When we read passages of Shakespeare, we may smile but mostly in admiration of how rollicking, how intricately offhand, great iambic pentameter with the touch of nature can be. Mozart may tickle us comparably, and indeed humor may somehow be a matter of music. When Twain's wife tried to show him how horrid his language around home sometimes was by repeating back to him a string of profanity he had uttered, he told her that she had the words right but not the tune. The harmonics of Mark Twain's prose…
At this point, despair begins to creep in. How much can be said about how funny anyone's writing is? Or should be said. Introduce something
by going on and on about how funny it is, and the reader may well begin to think, irritably, and quite rightly, “Perhaps I should be the judge of that.” Laughter is so gratifying because it is autonomic. “Nothing is so hopeless,” Dr. Johnson observed, “as a scheme of merriment.” Merriment bubbles, or not.
But let me quote from Twain's essay on his friend William Dean How-ells, a passage about Howells's humor. The tribute seems overgenerous as applied to Howells but not as it might apply to Twain himself:
I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as [Howells] does, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it…. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.
How universal is this refreshment? Is Twain's humor less accessible to non-American readers of English?
Widely traveled as he was, Twain's sensibility was not cosmopolitan. He took unalloyed pleasure in Francophobia (the very word
French,
as he uses it, seems to glow with distaste). The only thing that delighted him about German culture, aside from the manure piles of the Black Forest (“Manure is evidently the Black-Forester's main treasure—his coin, his pride, his Old Master, his ceramics, his bric-a-brac, his darling, his title to public consideration…, and his first solicitude when he gets ready to make his will”), was the national sentence structure:
An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech—not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary—six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam…; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed
together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of
it—after which comes the
VERB, and you can find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb—merely by way of ornament, so far as I can make out—the writer shovels in
“haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,”
or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.