The Last Empire (11 page)

New Zealand appeals to Twain; at least they did not slaughter the native population, though they did something almost as bad: “The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop,” which is how, through civilization, they did away with many of the original inhabitants. Lack of empathy is a principal theme in Twain’s meditations on race and empire. Twain notes with approval that New Zealand’s women have been able to vote since 1893. At sixty, he seems to have overcome his misogyny; our Freudian critic passes over this breakthrough in dark silence.

Ceylon delights. “Utterly Oriental,” though plagued by missionaries who dress the young in Western style, rendering them as hideous on the outside as they are making them cruelly superstitious on the inside. Twain broods on slavery as he remembered it a half-century before in Missouri. He observes its equivalent in Ceylon and India. He meets a Mohammedan “deity,” who discusses Huck Finn in perfect English. Twain now prefers brown or black skin to “white,” which betrays the inner state rather too accurately, making “no concealments.” Although he prefers dogs to cats, he does meet a dog that he cannot identify, which is odd since it is plainly a dachshund. He tries to get used to pajamas but goes back to the old-fashioned nightshirt. Idly, he wonders why Western men’s clothes are so ugly and uncomfortable. He imagines himself in flowing robes of every possible color. Heaven knows what this means. Heaven and a certain critic. . . .

Benares has its usual grim effect. Here, beside the Ganges, bodies are burned; and people bathe to become pure while drinking the polluted waters of the holiest of holy rivers. It is interesting that Twain never mentions the Buddha, who became enlightened at Benares, but he does go into some detail when he describes the Hindu religion. In fact, he finds the city of Benares “just a big church” to that religion in all its aspects. In Calcutta, he broods on the Black Hole, already filled in. The Taj Mahal induces an interesting reverie. Twain notes that when one has read so many descriptions of a famous place, one can never actually see it because of all the descriptions that crowd one’s mind. In this perception, Twain anticipates the latest—if not the last—theory of how memory works. He also broods on the phenomenon of Helen Keller, born deaf, dumb, and blind; yet able to learn to speak and think. How
does
the mind work?

From India, Twain and company cross the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. Although he often alludes to his lecturing, he never tells us what he talks about. He does note, “I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.” We learn that he dislikes Oliver Goldsmith and Jane Austen. As a prose writer, the imperialist Kipling beguiles him even though Twain likens empires to thieves who take clothes off other people’s clotheslines. “In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief.” He is more tolerant of the English. But then he is a confessed Anglophile.

Meanwhile, the ship is taking Twain and family down the east coast of Africa. South Africa is in ferment—Boers against English settlers, white against black. Cecil Rhodes is revealed as a scoundrel. But Twain is now writing as of May 1897, one year after his visit to South Africa, and so the outcome of all this is still unclear to him. He sides with the English, despite reservations about Rhodes and company. “I have always been especially fond of war. No, I mean fond of discussing war; and fond of giving military advice.” As for that new territorial entity, Rhodesia, Twain remarks that it is “a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it”; and he also has Pudd’nhead Wilson observe: “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”

Finally, “Our trip around the earth ended at Southampton pier, where we embarked thirteen months before. . . . I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years. . . .” But he had now seen the whole world, more or less at the equator, and, perhaps more to the point, quite a few people got to see Mark Twain in action, in itself something of a phenomenon, never to be repeated on earth unless, of course, his nemesis, Mary Baker Eddy, were to allow him to exchange her scientific deathless darkness for his limelight, our light.

The New York Review of Books

23 May 1996

* 
R
EPLY TO A
C
RITIC

While writing about Mark Twain’s views on imperialism, I checked some recent “scholarly” works to see how his reputation is bearing up under the great fiery cross of political correctness. We were all astonished, some years ago, when a squad of sharp-eyed textual investigators discovered, to their manifest surprise and horror, that the noblest character in Twain’s fiction was called “Nigger” Jim. There was an understandable outcry from some blacks; there was also a totally incomprehensible howl from a number of fevered white males, many of them professors emeritus and so, to strike the tautological note, career-minded conservatives unused to manning barricades.

In an apparently vain effort at comprehension, I quoted a number of malicious and, worse, foolish things that these silly-billies are writing about Twain. Thanks to an editorial quirk, one hothead was mentioned by
name
, for which I apologize. I always try to shield the infamous from their folly in the hope that they may, one day, straighten up and fly right. But a single name
was
mentioned and now we have its owner’s letter at hand. For serene duplicity and snappy illogic it compares favorably to some of the screeds, I believe they are called, from my pen pals in the Lincoln priesthood.

Although my new pen pal does acknowledge that I am reporting the views of other critics on Twain’s impotence, sexual infantilism, fondness for small girls, he declares mysteriously that this is “not what I say.” But it is what he says and presumably means. The Jesuits like to say: “The wise man never lies.” But in the army of my day, any soldier (or indeed discomfited general) who spent too much time twisting about the language of regulations in his own favor was called a guardhouse lawyer. I now put the case on the evidence at hand, that we have here a compulsive guardhouse lawyer or quibbler. Straight sentences must be bent like pretzels to change meanings to score points. But then much of what passes for literary discourse in these states is simply hustling words to get them to mean what they don’t. “That Clemens dreamed of little girls is well known.” Thus Quibbler wrote but now he has—tangential?—second thoughts. Actually who knows what Twain’s
dreams were. But let us agree that he doted on the company of Dodgsonesque girls and so may well have dreamed . . . fantasized about them in a sexual way. Why not? But Quibbler is getting a bit edgy. He thinks, too, that I have given him a splendid chance to open the guard-house door. Now we improvise: “that his dreams and reveries were pederastic is not said in my book by me or by anyone else.” But, of course, that’s what the professor (and presumably, those whom he adverts to) means in the course of a chapter entitled “Impotence and Pedophilia.”

But Quibbler has leapt at the adjective “pederastic.” Like so many Greekless Americans with pretensions, he thinks that the word means a liking for boys by men with buggery on their mind. But I had gone back to the original noun root,
paid
, from which comes pederasty, pedophilia, etc.; and
paid
means not boy but child. A quibble can be made that, as vulgar usage associates the word with boys, that’s what I mean but, as context makes clear, it is Lolita-
paid
—not Ganymede-
paid
—that Twain
may
be dreaming of. So this quibble is meaningless.

“The idea of impotence excited Clemens’s anxious interest: apparently he suffered from erectile dysfunction at about the age of fifty.” I noted in my review that “so do many men over fifty who drink as much Scotch whisky as Twain did.” Next: “Psychoanalysts have noted many cases in which diminished sexual capacity . . . has been related to a constellation of psychic problems like those which affected Clemens.” All right. Which psychoanalysts? Did any know him? As for his psychic problems, did he really have a constellation’s worth? “Evidence that he became impotent ranges from the filmy to the relatively firm”—I had some fun with those two loony adjectives. “Likelihood is high that diminished capacity may be inferred . . .” All these “apparentlys,” “likelihoods,” “inferreds” as well as filmy to firm “evidence” appear in one short paragraph.

What we have here is not a serious literary—or even, God help us, psychoanalytic—view of Twain’s sex life as imagined by a politically correct schoolteacher but what I take to be outright character assassination of a great man who happens to be one of the handful—small hand, too—of good writers our flimsy culture has produced. (“Filmy,” of course, may be the
mot juste
if we count the movies.) At one point, in the midst of a prurient flow of nonsense, the professor suddenly concedes, “We do not know the intimate details of Clemens’s life very well. . . .” I’ll say we don’t, so why go to such imaginative length to turn him into an impotent pederast, or pedophile?

Point two. Here we get the denial-of-meaning quibble based on Absence of Quotation Marks. I remark on Twain’s having, sickeningly, in the professor’s view, “
married above his station
in order to advance himself socially.” Blandly, the professor quibbles that he never used the italicized words. Yet they are an exact paraphrase of how he interprets Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon. Quibbler has reinvented his own text. Actually, it is his view that Twain did not marry above his station in any but the economic sense, although “like the most bourgeois of the bourgeois he delighted in money, and high living, and he fervently wished to become a member of the eastern establishment.” Surely, to get from Hannibal, Missouri, to the Gold Coast of Hartford was going to take a bit of social climbing, which he did by marrying into the Langdon family.

“Clemens was what Freud would call a narcissistic suitor.” Quibbler acts as if he is quoting some sort of authority in these matters. Ward McAllister might have been more to his point on American social climbing. “[Clemens] ardently wished to marry a woman who typified not what he was but what he wished to be—rich and possessed of status, a member of the eastern social order.” So, as I said in a phrase to which Quibbler objects, for no clear reason, “he married above his station.” (I’m surprised he does not make the point that Grand Central
Station
was not in use that hymenal year.) My use of the adverb “sickeningly” was meant to be ironic, something to which the teaching of school tends to make impervious even the brightest and the best. Anyway, Twain’s hypergamous marriage was a happy one, so what’s the big deal?

A lust for money that is banal anal (as opposed to floral oral) is simply a verbally symmetrical way of setting up Freud’s notion of money as “faeces.” How did I happen to get this juxtaposition in my head? At one point, our author suddenly quibbles that Twain didn’t marry Olivia for her money, at least “not in any banal sense of the phrase; but he very much wanted to be rich.” As I read the word “banal,” I knew that Freud’s theory of anality was coming up. I turned the page. There it was. “Freud stresses the anal character of money and equates money and feces: it means power, vitality, potency.” The one good thing about bad writing is that one is never surprised by any turn an argument, much less a cliché, may take.

Let me now indulge in quibbler creativity. Freud would never have characterized Twain as narcissistic—an adjective currently used to describe anyone better-looking than oneself. As performer-writer Twain took by storm Vienna in general and Freud in particular. Freud was also something of a connoisseur of jokes and he enjoyed Mark Twain in person and on the page quite as much as he would have reveled in the letter of Professor Emeritus Guy Cardwell.
Ich kann nicht anders
, I can hear Sigmund chuckle through his cigar smoke. (Cf.
The Strange Case of Dr. Luther Adler
by an Unknown Actress—op. cit. Just about anywhere.)

The New York Review of Books

19 September 1996

* 
T
WAIN’S
L
ETTERS

Reporting for the BBC during the election campaign, I stood in front of the Albert Hall, the voice of the crown in parliament incarnate, John Major, still ringing in my ears as, inside, a recording of Elgar caused a thousand gorges to rise, including that little part of me which is forever Dimbleby. I faced the BBC cameras. A
petit
mini-mini-documentary was in progress. “Here,” I said, head empty of all but emotion, “is the proof that only through England’s glorious past can a bright future be secured for this land of Drake and Nelson, of Clive—and Crippen.”

The BBC crew was ecstatic: like television crews everywhere, nobody ever listens to what the talking head is actually saying. What had come over me? What on earth was I doing? Well, like most American writers at one time or another, I was playing Mark Twain. The deadpan sonorous delivery. Then the careful dropping of the one fatal name. With Twain’s description of the Albert Hall flashing in my head, “a dome atop a gasometer,” I dimbled on to the safe ground of the understated cliché.

Mark Twain is our greatest . . . Mark Twain. He is not, properly speaking, a novelist nor “just” a journalist nor polemicist. He is simply a voice like no other. The only mystery to him is this: was he a great comic actor who could also write much as he acted, or was he a great writer who could also act, like Dickens? Some evidence of how he did both is now at hand in the form of the 309 letters that he wrote in the years 1872–3, when he first visited England and took the country by storm as a performer (the books
Innocents Abroad
and
Roughing It
had already, despite—or because of—their Americanness, been popular). England also took hugely to the 36-year-old Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Mo., and Hartford, Conn.). To his wife, Olivia, he wrote, after six months’ residence in the Langham Hotel (later to contain the BBC’s secret abattoir), “I would rather live in England than America—which is treason.” The fact of the matter is that
he was having a wonderful time being lionized by London’s tamers, ever on the lookout for a good joke. But then, as he himself put it, he was “by long odds the most widely known and popular American author among the English.” This was true too.