journalist, constantly describing daily things while recollecting old things. In the process, he made, from time to time, essential literature, including the darkest of American novels,
Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894).
Mark Twain’s view of the human race was not sanguine, and much has been made of that Calvinism out of which he came. Also, his great river, for all its fine amplitude, kept rolling along, passing villages filled with fierce monotheistic folk in thrall to slavery, while at river’s end there were the slave markets of New Orleans. Calvinist could easily become Manichean if he brooded too much on the river world of the mid-1800s. In
Pudd’nhead Wilson
, Twain’s as yet unarticulated notion that if there is a God (
What Is Man?
, 1906) he is, if not evil in the Manichean sense, irrelevant, since man, finally, is simply a machine acted upon by a universe “frankly and hysterically insane” (
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
): “Nothing exists but You. And You are but a
thought
.”
The agony of the twin boys in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
, one brought up white, the other black, becomes exquisite for the “white” one, who is found to be black and gets shipped downriver, his question to an empty Heaven unanswered: “What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him?” All this, then, is what is going on in Mark Twain’s mind as he gets ready for a second luxury tour, this time around the world.
* When one contemplates the anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, it is hard to tell just where it came from. During his lifetime the whole country was—like himself—on the make, in every sense. But Mark Twain was a flawed materialist. As a Southerner he should have had some liking for the peculiar institution of slavery; yet when he came to write of antebellum days, it is Miss Watson’s “nigger,” Jim, who represents what little good Twain ever found in man. Lynchings shocked him. But then,
pace
Hemingway, so did Spanish bullfights. Despite the various neuroses ascribed to him by our current political correctionalists, he never seemed in any doubt that he was a man and therefore never felt, like so many sissies of the Hemingway sort, a need to swagger about, bullying those not able to bully him.
In 1898, the United States provoked a war with Spain (a war with England over Venezuela was contemplated but abandoned since there was a good chance that we would have lost). The Spanish empire collapsed more from dry rot than from our military skills. Cuba was made “free,” and Puerto Rico was attached to us while the Spanish Philippines became our first Asian real estate and the inspiration for close to a century now of disastrous American adventures in that part of the world.
Mark Twain would have had a good time with the current demise of that empire, which he greeted, with some horror, in the first of his meditations on imperialism. The pamphlet “To the Person Sitting In Darkness” was published in 1901, a year in which we were busy telling the Filipinos that although we had, at considerable selfless expense, freed them from Spain they were not yet ready for the higher democracy, as exemplified by Tammany Hall, to use Henry James’s bitter analogy. Strictly for their own good, we would have to kill one or two hundred thousand men, women, and children in order to make their country into an American-style democracy. Most Americans were happy to follow the exuberant lead of the prime architect of empire, Theodore Roosevelt—known to the sour Henry Adams as “our Dutch-American Napoleon.” But then, suddenly, Mark Twain quite forgot that he was
the
American writer and erupted, all fire and lava.
The people who sit in darkness are Kipling’s “lesser breeds,” waiting for the white man to take up his burden and “civilize” them. Ironically, Twain compares our bloody imperialism favorably with that of the white European powers then abroad in the “unlit” world,
Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894).
Mark Twain’s view of the human race was not sanguine, and much has been made of that Calvinism out of which he came. Also, his great river, for all its fine amplitude, kept rolling along, passing villages filled with fierce monotheistic folk in thrall to slavery, while at river’s end there were the slave markets of New Orleans. Calvinist could easily become Manichean if he brooded too much on the river world of the mid-1800s. In
Pudd’nhead Wilson
, Twain’s as yet unarticulated notion that if there is a God (
What Is Man?
, 1906) he is, if not evil in the Manichean sense, irrelevant, since man, finally, is simply a machine acted upon by a universe “frankly and hysterically insane” (
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
): “Nothing exists but You. And You are but a
thought
.”
The agony of the twin boys in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
, one brought up white, the other black, becomes exquisite for the “white” one, who is found to be black and gets shipped downriver, his question to an empty Heaven unanswered: “What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him?” All this, then, is what is going on in Mark Twain’s mind as he gets ready for a second luxury tour, this time around the world.
* When one contemplates the anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, it is hard to tell just where it came from. During his lifetime the whole country was—like himself—on the make, in every sense. But Mark Twain was a flawed materialist. As a Southerner he should have had some liking for the peculiar institution of slavery; yet when he came to write of antebellum days, it is Miss Watson’s “nigger,” Jim, who represents what little good Twain ever found in man. Lynchings shocked him. But then,
pace
Hemingway, so did Spanish bullfights. Despite the various neuroses ascribed to him by our current political correctionalists, he never seemed in any doubt that he was a man and therefore never felt, like so many sissies of the Hemingway sort, a need to swagger about, bullying those not able to bully him.
In 1898, the United States provoked a war with Spain (a war with England over Venezuela was contemplated but abandoned since there was a good chance that we would have lost). The Spanish empire collapsed more from dry rot than from our military skills. Cuba was made “free,” and Puerto Rico was attached to us while the Spanish Philippines became our first Asian real estate and the inspiration for close to a century now of disastrous American adventures in that part of the world.
Mark Twain would have had a good time with the current demise of that empire, which he greeted, with some horror, in the first of his meditations on imperialism. The pamphlet “To the Person Sitting In Darkness” was published in 1901, a year in which we were busy telling the Filipinos that although we had, at considerable selfless expense, freed them from Spain they were not yet ready for the higher democracy, as exemplified by Tammany Hall, to use Henry James’s bitter analogy. Strictly for their own good, we would have to kill one or two hundred thousand men, women, and children in order to make their country into an American-style democracy. Most Americans were happy to follow the exuberant lead of the prime architect of empire, Theodore Roosevelt—known to the sour Henry Adams as “our Dutch-American Napoleon.” But then, suddenly, Mark Twain quite forgot that he was
the
American writer and erupted, all fire and lava.
The people who sit in darkness are Kipling’s “lesser breeds,” waiting for the white man to take up his burden and “civilize” them. Ironically, Twain compares our bloody imperialism favorably with that of the white European powers then abroad in the “unlit” world,
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