or, later, from the Greek Milesian tales of run-on anecdote. In any case, an American master of the often scabrous tall story, Twain himself was predated by, among others, Abraham Lincoln, many of whose stories were particularly noisome as well as worse—worse!—
politically incorrect
. Our stern Freudian critic finds Twain’s smutty stories full of “slurs” on blacks and women and so on. But so are those of Rabelais and Ariosto and Swift, Rochester and Pope and . . . Whatever the “true” motivation for telling such stories, Twain was a master in this line both in print and on the lecture circuit.
Primarily, of course, he was a popular journalist, and with the best-seller
Innocents Abroad
(1869) he made the hicks back home laugh and Henry James, quite rightly, shudder. Yet when the heavy-handed joky letters, written from the first cruise liner,
Quaker City
, became a text, it turned out to be an unusually fine-meshed net in which Twain caught up old Europe and an even older Holy Land and then, as he arranged his catch on the—well—deck of his art, he Americanized it in the most satisfactory way (“Lump the whole thing! Say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”), and made it possible for an American idea to flourish someday.
Twain was far too ambitious to be just a professional hick, as opposed to occasional hack. He had social ambitions; he also lusted for money (in a banal anal way, according to the Freudian emeritus—as opposed to floral oral?).
In the great tradition of men on the make, Twain married above his station to one Olivia Langdon of the first family of Elmira, New York. He got her to polish him socially. He also became a friend of William Dean Howells, a lad from the Western Reserve who had superbly made it in Boston as editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
. Howells encouraged Twain to celebrate the American “West” as the sort of romanticized Arcadia that Rousseau might have wanted his chainless noble savage to roam.
While knocking about the West and Southwest, Twain worked as pilot on Mississippi steamboats from 1857 to 1861; he joined the Civil War, briefly, on the Confederate side. When he saw how dangerous war might be, he moved on to the Nevada Territory, where his brother had been made secretary to the governor. He wrote for newspapers. In 1863, he started to use the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” a river pilot’s measurement of depth, called out on approaching landfall—some twelve feet, a bit on the shallow side for a proper ship.
After the war, Twain began to use life on the river and the river’s bank as a background for stories that were to place him permanently at the center of American literature:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876);
Life on the Mississippi
(1883);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884). He liked fame and money, the last perhaps too much since he was forever going broke speculating on experimental printing presses and underfinanced publishing houses. He lived in considerable bourgeois splendor at Hartford, Connecticut; oddly for someone who had made his fortune out of being
the
American writer, as he once described himself, Twain lived seventeen years in Europe. One reason, other than
douceur de la vie
, was that he was admired on the Continent in a way that he never was, or so he felt, by the eastern seaboard gentry, who were offended by his jokes, his profanity, his irreligion, and all those Scotch sours he drank. Fortunately, no one then suspected his erectile dysfunction.
Whenever cash was needed and a new book not ready to be sold to the public, Twain took to the lecture circuit. An interesting if unanswerable question: Was Mark Twain a great actor who wrote, or a great writer who could act? Or was he an even balance like Charles Dickens or George Bernard Shaw? Much of what Twain writes is conversation—dialogue—with different voices thrown in to delight the ear of an audience. But, whichever he was, he was always, literally, a
politically incorrect
. Our stern Freudian critic finds Twain’s smutty stories full of “slurs” on blacks and women and so on. But so are those of Rabelais and Ariosto and Swift, Rochester and Pope and . . . Whatever the “true” motivation for telling such stories, Twain was a master in this line both in print and on the lecture circuit.
Primarily, of course, he was a popular journalist, and with the best-seller
Innocents Abroad
(1869) he made the hicks back home laugh and Henry James, quite rightly, shudder. Yet when the heavy-handed joky letters, written from the first cruise liner,
Quaker City
, became a text, it turned out to be an unusually fine-meshed net in which Twain caught up old Europe and an even older Holy Land and then, as he arranged his catch on the—well—deck of his art, he Americanized it in the most satisfactory way (“Lump the whole thing! Say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”), and made it possible for an American idea to flourish someday.
Twain was far too ambitious to be just a professional hick, as opposed to occasional hack. He had social ambitions; he also lusted for money (in a banal anal way, according to the Freudian emeritus—as opposed to floral oral?).
In the great tradition of men on the make, Twain married above his station to one Olivia Langdon of the first family of Elmira, New York. He got her to polish him socially. He also became a friend of William Dean Howells, a lad from the Western Reserve who had superbly made it in Boston as editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
. Howells encouraged Twain to celebrate the American “West” as the sort of romanticized Arcadia that Rousseau might have wanted his chainless noble savage to roam.
While knocking about the West and Southwest, Twain worked as pilot on Mississippi steamboats from 1857 to 1861; he joined the Civil War, briefly, on the Confederate side. When he saw how dangerous war might be, he moved on to the Nevada Territory, where his brother had been made secretary to the governor. He wrote for newspapers. In 1863, he started to use the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” a river pilot’s measurement of depth, called out on approaching landfall—some twelve feet, a bit on the shallow side for a proper ship.
After the war, Twain began to use life on the river and the river’s bank as a background for stories that were to place him permanently at the center of American literature:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876);
Life on the Mississippi
(1883);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884). He liked fame and money, the last perhaps too much since he was forever going broke speculating on experimental printing presses and underfinanced publishing houses. He lived in considerable bourgeois splendor at Hartford, Connecticut; oddly for someone who had made his fortune out of being
the
American writer, as he once described himself, Twain lived seventeen years in Europe. One reason, other than
douceur de la vie
, was that he was admired on the Continent in a way that he never was, or so he felt, by the eastern seaboard gentry, who were offended by his jokes, his profanity, his irreligion, and all those Scotch sours he drank. Fortunately, no one then suspected his erectile dysfunction.
Whenever cash was needed and a new book not ready to be sold to the public, Twain took to the lecture circuit. An interesting if unanswerable question: Was Mark Twain a great actor who wrote, or a great writer who could act? Or was he an even balance like Charles Dickens or George Bernard Shaw? Much of what Twain writes is conversation—dialogue—with different voices thrown in to delight the ear of an audience. But, whichever he was, he was always, literally, a
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