THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS
"Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters."
ALEXANDER HARVEY.
At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going
through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of
men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a
certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you
would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface,
however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is
only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the
guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack
and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact
this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the
imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the
trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another
self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you
perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has
become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in
the twinkling of an eye.
So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one
of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and
preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts."
Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality
of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but
upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial
morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain,
as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the
profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been
submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the
respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to
depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the
explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside
circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he
wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would
not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self
had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had
concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct
of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that
instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and
manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never
having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to
air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were
black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning
Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant
blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on
it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the
conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it.
First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he
was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social
régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious
self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious
self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him
in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his
story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the
famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs,
he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse
races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with
his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi
diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his
best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two
incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the
symbol of Mark Twain himself.
Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged
on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was
always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the
floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by
apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's
adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset,"
till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent
the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he
always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his
will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant,
fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental
desire pointed him just the other way?
Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had
submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor,
the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His
absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development
of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain
was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house
was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own
drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent
caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the
householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one
observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting
against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being
"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and
tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and
wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary."
Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or
getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results
too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain
became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only
just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion,
he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so
extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which
developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one
of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and
the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with
her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have
been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not
qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone
who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose
myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which
the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other
caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old
Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic
protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it.
Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's
constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found
in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely
inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books.
We can see from this that although his conscious life had been
overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests,
his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature.
And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of
Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that
"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations
like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists
mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate,
that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of
Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness
and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I
should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark
Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had
regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially;
Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for
gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written
to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted
classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of
the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be
as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the
encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown;
but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of
fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language.
But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's
literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he
"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written
by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored
them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have
despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste
was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a
par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his
wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had
accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his
unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to
please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything
about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's
criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude
of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious
self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how
strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself
directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its
teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated
bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic
aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the
repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend
Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called,
and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a
companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he
roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried
self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a
prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model.
We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious
observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when
the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked
on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies
behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were
together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine,
guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made
until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has
taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and
troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke
of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner."
His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for
Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books,"
he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a
hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in
fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D.
White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar
books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after
Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and
Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times,
and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the
cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such
passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely
"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is
Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not.
For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I
ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other
difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when
at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword:
"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as
unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed,
kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and
could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not
I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no
other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which
his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for
Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually
praising their "unrestrained frankness."
And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of
parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark
Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he
wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread.
Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over
Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he
would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold
fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism
was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been
permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to
ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words.
Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the
time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the
English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and
assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could
not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the
riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he
poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of
a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at
a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity
among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title,
has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard
one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that
are current in every New York publishing house?
In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful
ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through
the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the
unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait
for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the
_outré_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia
Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark
Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon
upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and
they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and
thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it
from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily
search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and
oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in
order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they
were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort
of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the
texture of Mark Twain's writings.
For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through
with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In
the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish.
In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been
prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or
by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship
which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some
contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however,
are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In
such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully
satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a
compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two
railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms
of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud
has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any
reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we
are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious
bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those
embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that
express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies
wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon
which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or
rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this
process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there,
certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am
writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some
manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On
these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be
straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it."
When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead
Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was
frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote
his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about
himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia
of his soul.
Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly,
for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the
first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is
proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the
book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American
Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he
wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine.
Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly
expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to
be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that
never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion
mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself
once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in
short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed
were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that
sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such
times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all
sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits
of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible
animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort
on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a
propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved
abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to
literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in
the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally
been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian
monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant
farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce
to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing
circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but
two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed
the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately.
That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed
further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it
stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of
passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry
satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short,
that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far
relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the
battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our
very eyes.
Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of
"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is
surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the
celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward
J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the
Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they
made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the
celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this
Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him.
Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate
of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is
the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by
the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note
the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the
unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is
a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu
of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead
Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with
Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an
author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that
Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he
continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A
Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply
another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the
same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been
privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar,
with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form;
appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and
fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful
of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But
irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for
it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided
without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson
was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt
for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him
before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a
genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed
here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets
generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his
scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't
it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired
Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it
possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was
picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him?
Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures
Pudd'nhead out-manœuvring the village folk and triumphing over them
in the end.
Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That
Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame
and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more
or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says
Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally
and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were
never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place.
For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of
self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and
that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one
but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole
community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by
leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield
and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted
incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens,"
the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all
those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his
true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and
admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was
these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon
him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who
took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their
hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a
deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in
the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the
misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned,
the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to
recognize its divinity?
Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the
"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the
desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself
in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the
suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells
about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body
"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted,
far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no
chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale
of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of
a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old
castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into
subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation
for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that.
As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American
Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age,"
who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after
one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his
own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful
claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those
fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure
projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business
life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet
forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true
rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark
Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to
account for his constant preoccupation with this idea.
Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his
old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that
flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and
fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have
been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in
himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese
Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the
usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle
perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and
"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince
and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the rôle of the
beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn
himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the
Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically
slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of
incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the
"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad"
boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and
anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he
not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history
of his life?
We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was
expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become
owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the
poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American
progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,"
the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the
discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more
wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been
discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been
sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his
unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to
cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his
saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like
Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant,"
thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where
"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent,
Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we
perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save
his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained
fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his
finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do
than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how
could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy?
That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his
readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would
know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the
great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long
as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short,
he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the
public in the hollow of his hand, knew it.
It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand
the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn."
Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little
boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let
himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the
writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to
have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the
publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain!
Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the
censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an
irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this
world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization.
That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity
we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting
to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons
attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to
find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he
can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive!
Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness
are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of
the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his
unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical
passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the
mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by
the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has
the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add:
"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The
withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the
sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in
his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism
in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have
appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the
lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial
detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation.
"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't,"
says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable
on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that
river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole
unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds
and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of
the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"?
Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was
not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright,
shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is
because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that
gave it its momentum.
Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was
intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the rôle of a demiurge, in
fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and
misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for
this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed!
Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs,
petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the
domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those
second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank
it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and
general revolt of Huckleberry Finn:
"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work;
it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The
widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them
ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every
morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder;
she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them
blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem
to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten
nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around
anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it
'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and
sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in
there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The
widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits
up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't
stand it."
"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."
"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I
can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub
comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that
way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in
a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything.
Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got
to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to
git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder
wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she
wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before
folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now
these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I
ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...."
This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see
what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back.