Long Time Leaving (28 page)

England, however, was one of his favorite countries. To be sure, he damned Sir “Walter Scott's novels for inflating aristocratic romanticism in the antebellum South (a part of the country that Twain seldom regarded with anything approaching fondness after he left it, heading westward, as a young man, two weeks of highly irregular military service having been enough of the Civil “War for his taste). He mocked chivalry and royalty in
Huckleberry Finn
and
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
But he spent nearly three years altogether in London, where he was lionized. After Oxford granted him an honorary degree, he seized every opportunity to wear the robe that came with it. He absorbed a great deal of English literature in his youth, some of it while learning to pilot a riverboat from a man who interspersed recitations from Shakespeare with imprecations and instruction:

“Approach thou
what
are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the
there
she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you know she'd smell the reef if you crowded it like that? Hyrcan tiger…”

And yet that acute and droll English critic, V. S. Pritchett, in a collection of essays published in 1942, reduced all that was valuable of Mark Twain to one book: “Out of the mess which Twain made of his life, amid the awful pile of tripe which he wrote, there does rise one book which has the serenity of a thing of genius.
Huckleberry Finn
takes the breath away…. Twain has …become the channel of the generic American emotion which floods all really American literature—nostalgia…. D. H. Lawrence called this feeling the longing of the rebel for a master. It may be simply the longing for a spiritual home…. And once Mark Twain passed this exquisite moment of his maturity, he went to bits in that morass of sentimentality, cynicism, melodrama and vulgarity which have damned him for the adult reader.”

Certainly there is “sentimentality, cynicism, melodrama and vulgarity”
to be found in Twain, but is it to be found in Jim Baker's blue jay yarn?

Does “Taming the Bicycle” fit into an “awful pile of tripe”? “The contrast between [the instructor's] muscles and mine was quite marked. He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps—which was my best. It almost made him smile. He said, ‘It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag.’ ”

If Twain was longing for a spiritual home, it was not for a place too stuffy to appreciate extravagant yet closely observed empathy with a blue jay or affectionate deprecation of one's own right arm.

But then Pritchett may not have read many of Twain's best short pieces. Only over the last several years have many of them been brought back into circulation. In 1993, Clive James, another English critic acute and droll, took the occasion of the Library of America's issuance of two volumes of Twain's
Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays
to observe, in
The New Yorker,
that “you could just about convince yourself that
Huckleberry Finn
was a work of literature in the Old World style, aimed at a refined public—after all, it certainly has the rank, if not the manner. But Twain's
journalism is a daunting reminder that he was ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time…. For Twain, there was no division between democracy and creativity. They were versions of the same thing: exuberance.”

James, however, goes on in this review to extol Twain as a paragon of American decency Twain was so blameless that he is likely to make us uncomfortable.” Twain himself was full of discomfort and self-blame. His life may not have been the mess that Pritchett called it, but there was a great deal rotten in America when he flourished, and in his own life fiasco, terror, and grief ran high. He was not untouched by the rottenness, and he lived with more than a tortured inkling that much of the grief was his fault. He didn't cherish God, mankind, or available polity; if there was anything he had a soft spot for (aside from his wife and daughters, whom he loved and arguably blighted), it was death.

Yet he strove and gloried. Tension finding release at unexpected junctures in sentence after sentence.

“It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert,” wrote the aforementioned Howells, “that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of [Twain's] best humor. Its wildest extravagance is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter.”

Howells also wrote that Twain “used English in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground,” and that he “writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it, or German or French beside it.”

At any rate, his language is intimately his own and yet vigorously extroverted. His spiritual home is on the page, and you can still find him there, pretending not to be expecting company but relishing it in fact. His first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, told of finding Twain in bed (where he often wrote), looking for a newspaper clipping. The two of them kept digging around under the covers until finally Twain cried out, “One could
lose a dog
in this bed!” Which means, too, that a dog might turn up.

In an interview, the movie director Oliver Stone condescends to praise another director's heavy-handed baseball comedy for “telling a story in a big, broad, Mark Twain kind of way.” No. If anyone's way of telling a story is big and broad, or anyway broad, it is Stone's. Mark Twain's way was fine.

You might say that a man's claiming to have been shot nine times, beaten with a cowhide whip, stripped nearly naked, scalped, hit by a brick through the window, thrown through the window himself, and injured by shrapnel from a stove exploded by a hand grenade on his only day at a Tennessee newspaper is a broad way of depicting journalism in that state. But
delicacies
are involved:

Then, as one gentleman to another, they start blazing away in each other's general direction with large pistols, in the process thrice clipping the narrator. “I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.”

If this is broad, it is broad as Monty Python is broad, not as Benny Hill. There is, in fact, a Python sketch in which starving mariners argue over which of them should be eaten by the others—the captain is offended when none of the crew regards him as toothsome; they settle on making a stock of him. The Python sketch is deft, but Twain's “Cannibalism in the Cars” is at least as amusing, is sustained longer, and offers more (I venture to say, never having had dealings with the Royal Navy) in the way of verisimilitude.

You could call it broad for a man to complain that his watch, after a repairer of watches worked on it, performed as follows:

The watch “averaged well,” but this “is only a mild virtue in a watch.” If this is broad, it is broad as Borges is broad.

You might harbor the stereotypical notion that any sort of glass-eye humor, on the face of it, is broad. But what of glass-eye humor that crops up naturally in the course of things, as it does in “His Grandfather's Old Ram”:

Crops up naturally, and keeps on topping itself, without ever undermining Miss “Wagner's aplomb. I don't call that fine, because fine is too broad a term. I call that delicate.

Not broad, then, are Mark Twain's distinctive effects. Nor, except in the ripples they continue to make, are they big. The Mississippi River is big and broad, and so is the issue of American slavery, but
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is distinguished not by sweep or cumulative power but by moments, episodes, bits of dialogue or description, and, most important, a boy's narrative voice.

Like Twain the first-person humorist, Huck Finn the first-person moralist is absolutely straight-faced. I was going to say “adventurer” instead of “moralist,” but Huck (unlike Tom Sawyer) is not seeking adventure; he is trying to do the right thing—and trying, to be sure, to preserve his own personal freedom but not out of a sense of entitlement. He feels guilty about being unable to tolerate conventional strictures. Similarly, Twain's own persona in his sketches is not looking for humor; he is just trying to get by in a crazy world. Bowing out of bloodthirsty Tennessee journalism, he does not claim the high moral ground.
“I like you,” he informs the editor, “and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers; but you see I am not used to it…. Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.”

Huck is an unreliable narrator in that he never quite sees things the way the reader does, but his taking outrageous comic rapscallions at face value makes those characters all the more comic, just as his judging himself a dark sinner for going good-heartedly against established mores makes the enormity of those mores clear without sermonizing. Twain is a salubriously unreliable essayist. His way is matter-of-fact, which enables him to go surreal, as if against his will. His way is plain speaking, which enables him to be set upon by wonderfully resounding and tawdry rhetoric. If he had his way, life would be simple, peaceful, unfunny. No barber would have “made a handle of my nose, to assist him in shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps.”

You don't leave as many epigrams and celebrated paragraphs to posterity as Mark Twain did (“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them”) by being big and broad.

He made his name in the first place by means of comic sketches. In the mid-1860s, he wrote a number of them for newspapers in California and Nevada (whence he had traveled after giving up the Civil “War as not his sort of shooting match). Other periodicals around the American states and territories circulated these widely. He couldn't make a living out of short freelance humor (who, alas, has ever been able to?), so he turned his hand to books and lecturing, thereby becoming a major writer and a beloved public character. But he continued to write sketches throughout his career. The best of these, along
with Huckleberry Finn,
are the works of his that are most read and quoted from today.

Mark Twain enjoyed coming off as an old gold miner, a failed one at that, but his style was lapidary. He might rather have been describing his own style when he wrote of his friend William Dean Howells:

Howells is scarcely read anymore. Few people today could tell you how a sumac-berry tastes, or precisely what mining process is alluded to in “quicksilver raiding down a riffle.” But as long as any form of written English is intelligible to anyone, I'll wager, the best bits of Mark Twain will be “electrically prompt.”