Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 2:37 AM
Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Democracy 101
Mark Twain's farewell address
by Lewis H Lapham
Harper's Magazine (April 2011)
What a king must suffer! For he knows, deep down in his heart, that
he is a poor, cheap, wormy thing like the rest of us, a sarcasm, the
Creator's prime miscarriage in inventions, the moral inferior of all the
animals . the superior of them all in one gift only, and that one not up
to his estimation of it - intellect.
- The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume One
Toward the end of his life Mark Twain lost much of his liking for what
he had come to regard as "the damned human race", but he held fast to
his delight in the one gift only in which he believed man superior to
the animals. It is the mark on even the least of the pages in the
edition of his autobiography that after a century in exile emerged last
November from the University of California Press. The happy return would
have been welcome in any event, the more so in my own particular
circumstance because it excused my absence from the winter festival of
think-tank discussions addressed to the disappearance of the American
future. The losses suffered by the Democratic Party in the midterm
congressional election prompted the springing up of symposia, like
mushrooms after rain, in every barren field of liberal political thought
tended by the growers of the country's conscience (blue dog, moderate,
progressive), and between Thanksgiving and Christmas I was asked to work
up presentations on President Obama's mishandling the miracle of the
loaves and fishes, the enslavement of a once-upon-a-time free press, the
same-day deliveries of Congress to the banks. The sponsors of the
programs in both the red states and the blue didn't stint their viewings
with alarm. The situation was desperate, the economy in dire straits,
the democracy on its deathbed.
I expressed my condolences, said that I was sorry to hear the news, but
never having been sure-handed either with the assembling of Lego blocks
or the numbering of PowerPoints, I was at a loss for emergency
procedures. Fortunately I'd been reading Twain, keeping company with the
genius of his abundant humor while exchanging emails with the Isaiahs in
the void. Sometimes for the fun of it I inquired as to what it was -
absent a shower of gold falling from the hand of a merciful Providence
on the Continental Divide - that needed to be done, presumably at once
and in a way that wouldn't cast a pall on the Academy Awards, depress
television ad sales at the Super Bowl, frighten the chauffeurs at
Goldman Sachs.
The messages came back with appeals for some sort of uplifting vision in
a desert, the priority a watchword to reawaken the American spirit,
redecorate the front parlor of the American soul. This request I took to
mean that instead of bringing a polemic to Massachusetts or a piety to
Texas, I could send the website link to Twain. He doesn't set much store
by moral calisthenics or the laundering of soup-stained souls, but even
as presented in academic grave cloths by the editors in California, his
autobiography renders moot the funeral arrangements for the American
idea. The man is at play with the freedom of his mind, which, unless I
misread the history lesson, is what America is about.
As Twain remembers but the policy planners in our midst tend to forget,
the Constitution was made for the uses of the individual, an implement
on the order of a plow, an axe, a surveyor's plumb line, the
institutions of government meant to support the liberties of the people
as opposed to the ambitions of the state. Love of country follows from
the love of its freedoms, not from a pride in its fleets, its armies, or
its gross domestic product, and what joins the Americans one to another
is not a common ancestry, race, or language, all of them weighted with
the burdens of the past, but rather their complicity in a shared work of
the imagination.
If America is about nothing else, it is about making it up as one goes
along, the chance to build a raft of serviceable identity on which to
float south to Vicksburg or the islands of the blessed. To read at will
in Twain's autobiography is to be reminded that in one way or another
the American is an improvisation, the character in a play of his or her
own invention, hoping that the audience - fortunately consisting of
actors as makeshift as oneself - will accept the performance at par,
believe the instructions. Mark Twain was the name given by the young
Samuel Langhorne Clemens to the figure first billed on San Francisco
lecture platforms as the "Wild Humorist of The Pacific Slope". The nom
de plume he requisitioned from Isaiah Sellers, a Mississippi River
steamboat captain who contributed bulletins under that letterhead to the
New Orleans Picayune. Clemens took the name after the captain's death,
indebted to him for the first newspaper article he ever published, two
columns of "the solid nonpareil", in which the captain had been the butt
of the joke.
Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that
day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words.
It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as
Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of
it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was much
greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of
people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.
America's moral code Twain understood to be political, the protection of
the other fellow's liberty in exchange for the protecting of one's own,
the object being to allow for the broadest range of expression and the
widest room for maneuver, its emphasis on the companionable virtues -
kindness, tolerance, and candor. The companionable virtues are not
commandments that fall like heavy stones from heaven. They are the work
of the one gift only that raises "bloody and atrocious man" to at least
a modest height above the animals, Twain's judgment rendered in the
absence of "respectworthy evidence that the human being has morals. He
is himself the only witness. Persons who do not know him value his
testimony."
Twain's faith in the uses of intellect informs the chapter of his Life
on the Mississippi (1876) that takes up the topic of piloting steamboats:
There is one faculty that the pilot must incessantly cultivate
until he has brought it to absolute perfection . That faculty is memory.
He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so, he must know
it . One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know
every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with
absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and
travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know
every door and lamppost and big and little sign by heart, and know them
so accurately that you could instantly name the one you are abreast of
when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky
black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the
exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in
his head.
The exactness of Twain's intelligence was formed by the sight lines of
the mid-nineteenth-century American frontier, grounded in the experience
that the essayist and historian Bernard DeVoto recognized as that of a
young man accustomed to scenes of human squalor and depravity, who had
"observed night-riding and lynching, the flogging of slaves", was
familiar with the "commonplaces of lust and corruption, violence and
subornation and cruelty", "who as a printer had been little better than
a tramp", had joined the surge westward to the Nevada silver mines and
the California goldfields, had "conversed with murderers and harlots",
had seen a sizable number of men die "in their boots under his immediate
observation". A mise en scene in which the man who didn't see clearly
didn't live long enough to hear the punch line and get the joke.
The clarity of Twain's perception presented him with difficulties when
he first undertook the project of an autobiography in 1877, at the age
of forty-two, already established as a famous author and confident that
he could employ the approach that in 1859 had shaped his navigations of
the Mississippi River. He soon encountered snags and shoals unlike those
above and below Island 66, many years later admitting to a reporter from
the London Times,
You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too
much ashamed of yourself. It's too disgusting.
Despite the hazards both apparent and submerged, he was unwilling to
abandon the project. He had in mind both the story of a life and the
portrait of an age, and over the course of the next twenty-five years he
attempts thirty or forty further drafts, all of them unsatisfactory
because "life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and
happenings. It consists mainly of a storm of thoughts that is forever
blowing through one's head", and therefore too quickly come and gone.
Together with the sheafs of misbegotten paper, his doubts accumulate
during the years in which he is also writing nine other books, among
them Huckleberry Finn (1884). To his friend William Dean Howells, the
novelist and turn-of-the-century dean of American letters, he says that
maybe "between the lines some shred of the 'remorseless truth'" will
show up in a manuscript that otherwise "consists mainly of extinctions
of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth".
Twain doesn't intend an examination of his inner child or a confession
from his cloistered id. He is by nature reserved, and although he
admires the candid memoirs of both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Giacomo
Casanova, he knows himself incapable of similar indiscretions.
Eventually he takes to heart the advice from his friend John Hay, a
former secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and secretary of state in
the McKinley Administration, who suggests that he proceed by inference
and indirection to describe the dramatis personae of whom he has some
knowledge, and in so doing find himself reflected in the mirror of his
observation, "each fact and each fiction will be a dab of paint, each
will fall in its right place, and together they will paint his portrait;
but not the portrait he thinks they are painting, but his real portrait,
the inside of him, the soul of him, his character". He will, of course,
tell lies, but "half-consciously" instead of "bluntly", in a way that
"makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences
discernable and his ungracious ones in shadow".
And thus it comes to pass, the result of Twain's electing to talk, not
write, his autobiography. He begins the experiment in 1904 in Florence,
where he has rented a handsome villa in which to care for his cherished
but dying wife. Knowing that his own turn in the pilothouse is nearly
up, he writes to Howells to say, "I've struck it!", a method that both
suits his temperament and matches his talent for telling stories.
You will be astonished (& charmed) to see how like talk it is, &
how real it sounds, & how well & compactly & sequentially it constructs
itself, & what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what a
darling & worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor
& fuss & the other artificialities!
By artificialities he means his prior efforts with pen and ink, which
are "too literary, too prim, too nice".
Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and
the leafy woodlands . a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but
goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes
fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around and at the end of
the circuit flowing within a yard the path that it traversed an hour
before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always
loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do
but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made.
His wife doesn't survive her season in the Italian sun, and soon after
Twain returns to America, he casts himself loose on the flood tide of
his memory, giving his deposition to a series of stenographers while
lying garrulously abed, "propped up against great snowy white pillows",
in a Fifth Avenue town house three blocks north of Washington Square,
here and there introducing into the record miscellaneous exhibits -
previously published speeches, anecdotes and sketches, newspaper
clippings, brief biographies, letters, philosophical digressions and
theatrical asides - that he thinks might serve to mark the passage of
his life. Conceiving the dictations as a "bequest to posterity", he
composes his farewell address over a period of nearly four years, from
the winter of 1906 until a few months before his death in the spring of
1910, imposing on his testimony the condition that it not be published
before the passing of another hundred years.
His reason is twofold. He can speak freely, be "as frank and free and
unembarrassed as a love letter if I knew that what I was writing would
be exposed to no eye until I was dead, and unaware, and indifferent". He
also can avoid the inflicting of collateral damage. As both best-selling
author and for forty years a popular attraction on lecture platforms in
front of literary swells in Boston, noble lords in London, and
dance-hall girls in Carson City, Twain had aimed to please, to produce
laughter in commercial quantity. The laughter he regarded as a blessing
and a comfort, humor "the great thing, the saving thing" that makes
bearable the acquaintance with grief, his own and that of everybody else
in the saloon, the theater, or the drawing room. He didn't wish to hurt
anybody's feelings by revealing "every private opinion I possessed
relative to religion, politics, and men", and he told his literary heirs
and assigns that a century's tape delay was time enough to remove from
the company of his prospective readers any and all likely to take offense.
This book is not a revenge-record. When I build a fire under a
person in it, I do not do it merely because of the enjoyment I get out
of seeing him fry, but because he is worth the trouble. It is then a
compliment, a distinction; let him give thanks and keep quiet. I do not
fry the small, the commonplace, the unworthy.
Twain's literary heirs and assigns haven't done him any favors. The book
is cumbersome and heavy (736 pages, four pounds), the footnotes overly
extensive, much of the text picked over by prior editors (among them
DeVoto) and elsewhere exposed to the light of print. Twain didn't get
his expected chance to amend or revise a completed manuscript eventually
running to a length of 2,600 pages; the deposition taken over the last
four years of his life has been reduced to the fragment given during the
three months between January 9 and March 30 1906, his instructions
honored in the breach, but his editors promising to release volumes two
and three sometime in the next ten years.
And yet, against all odds and expectations, the book sold upward of
300,000 copies within the first six weeks of publication. Allow for the
customary deductions (a third of the copies bought as Christmas
ornaments, another third as table decorations), and the country
apparently still has on hand at least 100,000 citizens willing to place
a $34.95 bet on the force of language and the play of mind. The number
compares favorably with the populations of Periclean Athens and
Elizabethan London and embodies a better hope for the American future
than any anxious policy paper passed around the winter conference tables
of despair.
Twain offers his autobiography as an omnium-gatherum, its author
reserving the right to wander at will all over his life, talk only about
the thing that interests him at the moment, "drop it the moment its
interest threatens to pale". He leaves the reader free to adopt the same
practice, which is a kindness because much of the interest in what Twain
has to say is so pale that it is barely visible, sometimes as monotonous
as the conversation that he reports his having suffered under the baton
of the Civil War general Daniel Sickles, which reminded him of "the late
Bill Nye once saying, 'I have been told that Wagner's music is better
than it sounds'". The often sluggish going of Twain's narrative around a
long horseshoe bend doesn't give offense because his reader isn't
obliged to be polite, isn't sitting with a one-legged general in a West
9th Street parlor festooned with "lion skins, tiger skins, leopard
skins, elephant skins . gushing sprays of swords fastened in trophy form
against the wall". If I come across Twain recalling a meeting of the
Hartford Monday Evening Club in 1884 at which the subject of discussion
is the price of cigars or the befriending of cats, I can skip over as
many pages as I please to find him in Honolulu in 1866 with the
survivors of forty-three days at sea in an open boat, or discover him in
Calcutta in 1896 in the company of Mary Wilson, "old and gray-haired,
but . very handsome", a woman whom he had much admired in her prior
incarnation as a young woman in 1849 in Hannibal, Missouri:
We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty souls in the
reviving wine of the past, the pathetic past, the beautiful past, the
dear and lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon
our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with
reverent hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and
caressed them with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our
memories and dragged forth incident after incident, episode after
episode, folly after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with
the tears running down .
The topic of Twain's autobiography is America and the Americans, his own
life the progress of an observant pilgrim carrying in his head the
reviving wine of the past as if it were the Mississippi River, the flow
and stream of time caught up in the net of his comprehensive and
comprehending memory. No other writer of his generation had touched the
life of the country in so many places, or become familiar with as many
of its oddly assorted inhabitants. Born in 1835 on the frontier of what
was still Indian Territory, Twain had been present not only at the wheel
of the steamboat Pennsylvania and at the pithead of the Comstock Lode
but at dinner tables with Presidents Ulysses Grant and Theodore
Roosevelt, on stages with Artemus Ward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bret Harte,
and Booker T Washington. He also traveled forty-nine times across the
Atlantic and once across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, as a dutiful
tourist surveying the sights in Rome, Paris, and the Holy Land; as an
itinerant sage entertaining crowds in Australia and Ceylon; as a visitor
in London in 1897 for the pageant that was Queen Victoria's Diamond
Jubilee, in Vienna in 1896 for a parading of the plumes of the Hapsburg
Empire, "bodies of men-at-arms in the darling velvets of the Middle Ages
. beautiful costumes not to be seen in this world now outside the opera
and the picture-books".
The scenes of foreign pomp and circumstance serve Twain as occasions to
prefer the unpretentiousness of things American. The turn of his mind is
democratic. He holds his fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not
because they are rich or beautiful or famous but because they are his
fellow citizens. He finds them plying trades in Massachusetts, building
roads in Illinois, murdering one another in Nevada and California,
outward bound toward some optimistic future across the next stretch of
mountains or around the next bend in the river where the rainbow falls
into the pot of gold. He employs his dictations as "a form and method
whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face-to-face
resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like
contact of flint with steel". He does not favor the "showy episodes" of
his life, choosing instead "the common experiences" that make up the
life of the average human being, and among the great snowy pillows on
lower Fifth Avenue in the last years of his life, he brings them face to
face in the contrapuntal music that is his play with words, something
seen in Berlin in 1891 reminding him of something else seen in San
Francisco in 1864, an impression of the first time he saw Florence in
1892 sending him back to Missouri in 1847:
The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and
so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and
mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the
wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of
drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of
woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the
remotenesses of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild
creatures scurrying through the grass, - and I can call it all back and
make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the
prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging
motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the
vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers . I can see the
blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the
saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell.
The first volume of Twain's autobiographical project is for the most
part taken up with his saving humor and gregarious affections, the
character of his mind revealed, as his friend John Hay had foreseen, in
the dabs of paint that Twain applies to the figure in the foreground.
An encounter with John Hay's wife:
That Sunday morning, twenty-five years ago, Hay and I had been
chatting and laughing and carrying-on almost like our earlier selves of
'67, when the door opened and Mrs Hay, gravely clad, gloved, bonneted,
and just from church, and fragrant with the odors of Presbyterian
sanctity, stood in it. We rose to our feet at once, of course, - rose
through a swiftly falling temperature - a temperature which at the
beginning was soft and summer-like, but which was turning our breath and
all other damp things so to frost crystals by the time we were erect -
but we got no opportunity to say the pretty and polite thing and offer
the homage due: the comely young matron forestalled us. She came forward
smileless, with disapproval written all over her face, said most coldly,
"Good morning Mr Clemens", and passed on and out.
There was an embarrassed pause - I may say a very embarrassed
pause. If Hay was waiting for me to speak, it was a mistake; I couldn't
think of a word. It was soon plain to me that the bottom had fallen out
of his vocabulary, too. When I was able to walk I started toward the
door, and Hay, grown gray in a single night, so to speak, limped feebly
at my side, making no moan, saying no word. At the door his ancient
courtesy rose and bravely flickered for a moment, then went out. That is
to say, he tried to ask me to call again, but at that point his ancient
sincerity rose against the fiction and squelched it. Then he tried
another remark, and that one he got through with. He said pathetically,
and apologetically,
"She is very strict about Sunday".
In the old Music Hall in Boston, seated on the stage with Josh Billings
and Petroleum V Nasby while another of the evening's humorists meets
with the catastrophe of silence:
We drew a deep sigh; it ought to have been a sigh of pity for a
defeated fellow-craftsman, but it was not - for we were mean and
selfish, like all the human race, and it was a sigh of satisfaction to
see our unoffending brother fail.
On Olivia Langdon Clemens, to whom Twain had been married for
thirty-four years and who died in Florence in June 1904:
I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother
Charley's stateroom in the steamer Quaker City in the Bay of Smyrna, in
the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her in
the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December. She
was slender and beautiful and girlish - and she was both girl and woman.
She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a
grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy,
energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection.
On patriotism:
I said that no party held the privilege of dictating to me how I
should vote. That if party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no
patriot, and that I didn't think I was much of a patriot anyway, for
oftener than otherwise what the general body of Americans regarded as
the patriotic course was not in accordance with my views; that if there
was any valuable difference between being an American and a monarchist
it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is
patriotic and what isn't; whereas the king could dictate the
monarchist's patriotism for him - a decision which was final and must be
accepted by the victim; that in my belief I was the only person in the
sixty millions - with Congress and the Administration back of the sixty
million - who was privileged to construct my patriotism for me.
They said "Suppose the country is entering upon a war - where do
you stand then? Do you arrogate to yourself the privilege of going your
own way in the matter, in the face of the nation?"
"Yes", I said, "that is my position. If I thought it an unrighteous
war I would say so. If I were invited to shoulder a musket in that cause
and march under that flag, I would decline. I would not voluntarily
march under this country's flag, nor any other, when it was my private
judgment that the country was in the wrong. If the country obliged me to
shoulder the musket I could not help myself, but I would never
volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and
consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should
be called a traitor, I am well aware of that - but that would not make
me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me
a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one
in the whole country.
On receiving the news of the death of his daughter Susy Clemens:
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all
unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is
but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the
shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to
realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb
sense of vast loss - that is all. It will take mind and memory months,
and possibly years, to gather together the details and thus learn and
know the whole extent of the loss . It will be years before the tale of
lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the
magnitude of his disaster.
The seventy-five years of Twain's life (1835 to 1910) ran in parallel
with America's transforming an agrarian democracy into an industrial
oligarchy that brought with it the feasts of conspicuous consumption to
which Twain gave the name the Gilded Age. He associated the phrase with
the word citified, "that epithet which suggests the absence of all
spirituality, and the presence of all kinds of paltry materialisms, and
mean ideals, and mean vanities and silly cynicisms". He doesn't overlook
his own paltry materialisms and mean vanities, and just as he can
remember the taste and smell of the wild grapes among the foliage and
saplings on the Missouri frontier, he can call back, "and make it as
real as it ever was", the selfishness and hypocrisy that made both
himself and America great. Thus on January 23 1906, comfortably placed
on the Fifth Avenue pillows and in the midst of talking about some
harmless clergyman among the members of the Hartford Monday Evening
Club, he inserts a few notes on the character of man that he thinks
might go well in a properly uplifting Sunday sermon:
There are certain sweet-smelling sugar-coated lies current in the
world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together
to support and perpetuate. One of these is, that there is such a thing
in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of
opinion, independence of action .
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and
then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are
afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force
ourselves to wear to please Mrs Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable
in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore
it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. Look
at the candidates whom we loathe, one year, and are afraid to vote
against the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth, one year, and
fall down on the public platform and worship, the next - and keep on
doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year's
evidences brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this
year's .
Let us skip the other lies, for brevity's sake. To consider them
would prove nothing, except that man is what he is - loving toward his
own, lovable, to his own, - his family, his friends - and otherwise the
buzzing, busy trivial, enemy of his race - who tarries his little day,
does his little dirt, commends himself to God, and then goes out into
the darkness, to return no more, and send no messages back - selfish
even in death.
On Friday, March 9, he's been talking about a slave woman who pulled him
as a child out of Bear Creek, thereby saving his life even though she
was "interfering with the intentions of a Providence wiser" than
herself. When he resumes the dictation on Monday, March 12, he means to
return to events in Missouri sixty years ago, but "strong as that
interest is, it is for the moment pushed out of the way by an incident
of to-day, which is still stronger". He refers to the publication in the
New York papers on the preceding Friday of a triumphant cablegram sent
to the government in Washington by General Leonard Wood, commander of
America's army of occupation in the Philippines. Twain summarizes the
message in a few sarcastic paragraphs. The intrepid troops under the
direction of the heroic general have trapped a swarm of half-naked
natives (600 Moros, counting women and children) in a crater fifty feet
below the rim of a defunct volcano. The Moros are armed with knives and
clubs. An equal number of American troops hoist artillery up to the rim
of the volcano and shoot all the fish in the barrel, abolishing them
utterly, says Twain, "leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead
mother". He enters into the record the congratulatory telegram sent to
the general by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Washington, March 10
Wood, Manila: -
I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon
the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor
of the American flag.
(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt
Twain is acquainted with Roosevelt, describes him elsewhere in his
dictations as a "likeable", "hearty", and "straight-forward" sort of
man, who therefore is certain to know that he is lying, that it would
not have been "a brilliant feat of arms" even if Christian America,
represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and
the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our
uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag but
had done as they had been doing continually in the Philippines - that is
to say, they had dishonored it.
What saddens Twain and therefore sharpens the edge of his satire ("The
President's joy over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet,
General Wood") is the laying waste of Roosevelt's humanity, his
devolution into "a poor, cheap, wormy thing, like the rest of us, a
sarcasm".
Twain is too intelligent not to see, as he noted in his interview with
the London Times, the shameful and disgusting contents of his own
private soul, among them his lack of candor, his wearing a suit of words
to please Mrs Grundy when it comes to the villainy of Roosevelt. He
doesn't doubt the sincerity of the president's boyish enthusiasms, but
the splendid little war with Spain he regards as the work of a criminal.
It is an opinion he has expressed privately but not one that he has
voiced in print, and he regrets his failure to do so in a letter to his
daughter Clara, written two months before he died and appended to the
autobiography in a footnote:
Roosevelt closed my mouth years ago with a deeply valued,
gratefully received, unasked favor; & with all my bitter detestation of
him I have never been able to say a venomous thing about him in print
since - that benignant deed always steps in the way & lays its
consecrated hand upon my lips. I ought not to allow it to do this; & I
am ashamed of allowing it, but I cannot help it, since I am made in that
way, & did not make myself. {1}
{1} Twain does not reveal the favor.
Made, like all other men, as one of the Creator's prime miscarriages in
invention and therefore apt to bury the light of intellect in the dung
heap of moralizing cowardice. Twain again touches on the point in one of
his further reflections on the Creator's gifts to man and beast.
The gods value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to
intellect, nor offered it a single reward. If intellect is welcome
anywhere in the other world, it is in hell, not heaven.
In hell's holiday resorts on earth, Twain's intellect is the weapon that
he brings to the defense of what he construes as the American idea. He
began the project of his autobiography in 1877, a year that the
historian Allan Nevins ranked as "one of the blackest in the nation's
annals". Then as now, the situation was desperate, the economy in dire
straits, democracy on its deathbed. The country was in severe
depression, the rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, and business failure
pegged to unprecedented levels of violence, poverty, and despair. The
presidential election of 1876 had been thoroughly corrupted by
fraudulent vote counts in favor of each candidate (the Republican
Rutherford B Hayes, the Democrat Samuel J Tilden, both of them held
captive by the banks). A number of Republican politicians had been
murdered in the Southern states for their disagreement with the policy
of lynching Negroes. The Lincoln County war in New Mexico encouraged the
random shooting of Mexicans; mobs formed in the streets of San Francisco
to beat to death the Yellow Peril as personified in Chinese laundrymen
and shopkeepers. A railroad strike in West Virginia that began in July
became the first national strike in the country's history, 500,000
workers walking away from factories and mines everywhere between New
Jersey and California. Strikers in Pittsburgh set fire to the property
of the Pennsylvania Railroad, destroying 39 buildings, 104 engines, 46
passenger cars, more than 1,200 freight cars. The disturbance moved Tom
Scott, president of the railroad, to suggest that the strikers be given
"a rifle diet for a few days and see how they liked that kind of bread".
State militia and federal troops complied with the suggestion, killing
more than a hundred strikers in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Twain's view of the proceedings is a good deal clearer than that of our
own latter-day viewers-with-alarm. Our reluctance to see democracy for
what it is follows from the dream of perfection reflected in the
department-store windows of a self-glorifying second Gilded Age. Twain
had counted the cost of the imperial plumes and darling velvets. His
life was coincident with the calamity that was the collision of the
democratic ideal with the democratic reality, the warm promise of a
generous experiment run aground on the reef of destruction that is the
damned human race. Although less evident in this first volume of his
autobiography than in his later books and newspaper writings - A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Following the Equator
(1897), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), "An Open Letter to Commodore
Vanderbilt", and To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901) - the
intelligence that is generous, intuitive, and sympathetic is also, in
DeVoto's parsing of it, "undeluded, merciless and final". An early
executor of Twain's literary estate, DeVoto had a better understanding
of Twain's humor than do most of our contemporary critics, among them
last winter's reviewers of the autobiography for The New Yorker and the
New York Times, who chose to see him as an amiable after-dinner speaker,
a man who told funny stories and smoked cigars, had worn a white suit
and by some inexplicable chance had written two important books for
boys, but not the sort of fellow whom one would wish to mention in the
same ennobling breath with Mr Henry James.
A similarly condescending tone infuriated DeVoto when he encountered it
in New York's literary salons in the 1920s, dribbling from pursed lips
onto the tea tables at the Century Club. The injustice of the faint
praise moved DeVoto to publish Mark Twain's America in 1932, a book in
which he ridicules the blind mouths of polite opinion:
Criticism has said that [Twain] directed no humor against the
abuses of his time: the fact is that research can find few elements of
the age that Mark Twain did not burlesque, satirize, or deride. The
whole obscene spectacle of government is passed in review - the
presidency, the Congress, the basis of politics, the nature of
democracy, the disintegration of power, the corruption of the electorate
- bribery, depravity, subornation, the farce of the people's justice .
The Gilded Age . is his creation, and in the wide expanse of his books,
there are few social ulcers he does not probe.
A society that is the sum of its vanity and greed Twain understood to be
not a society at all but a state of war. If in the volume at hand there
is too little of his merciless and undeluded wit, there is enough of it
to demonstrate why Twain these days is so sorely missed. Democracy is a
dangerous business; it allies itself with change, which engenders
movement, which induces friction, which implies unhappiness, which
assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary
condition of its existence. The idea collapses unless countervailing
stresses oppose one another with competing weight - unless enough people
stand willing to sustain the argument between the governing and the
governed, between city and town, capital and labor, men and women,
matter and mind.
Twain comes down on the side of the liberties of the people as opposed
to the ambitions of the state, pitting the force of his intellect
against the "peacock shams" of the world's "colossal humbug", believing
that it is the freedoms of thought that rescue a democracy from its
stupidities and crimes, the courage of its dissenting citizens that
protects it against the despotism of wealth and power backed up with
platitudes and billy clubs and subprime loans. His laughter turns toward
the darker shores of tragedy as he grows older and moves downriver,
drawing from the well of his sorrow the energy of his rage. He doesn't
traffic in the mockery of the cynic or the bitterness of the
misanthrope. He is a disenchanted philanthropist who retains his
affection for individuals, a fierce skeptic who thinks that the
Constitution is the premise for a narrative rather than the design for a
monument or the plan of an invasion.
The narrative is plural, not one story but many stories, and "nothing to
do but make the trip; the how of it not important so that the trip is
made". If democracy is a constant making and remaking, of laws and
institutions as well as jokes, the other fellow always has something to
say without the prompt of a surveillance camera or a directive in the
Patriot Act. The immortality of the whole overrules the immortality of
the part, allows for the possibility that one's children might prove to
be happier (or stronger or wiser or luckier) than oneself. It is the
reviving wine of history that defends the future against the past,
satire the arson that burns down the hospitality tents of complacent and
self-righteous cant.
Our contemporary brigade of satirists doesn't play with fire. The heavy
calibers of Twain's humor have gone missing from our news and
entertainment media because the audiences made for television don't look
with favor upon the kind of jokes that cast doubt on the guarantee of
happiness and the promise of redemption. Taught to believe that
democracy is something quiet, orderly, and safe, a peaceful idea
supportive of think-tank viewings with alarm and the keeping of pets as
fragrant as Alan Greenspan and General David Petraeus, they prefer the
safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain
was an adult.
_____
Lewis H Lapham is editor emeritus of Harper's Magazine and the editor of
Lapham's Quarterly.
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