BOOK REVIEW--
MARK TWAIN: A LIFE
by Ron Powers (FREE PRESS, a div. of Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005)
Thursday, January 26, 2012
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
This is a towering biography of “Mark Twain” nee Samuel Langhorne
Clemens. He was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, and he died April
21, 1910, at home in Redding, Connecticut. This work illuminates that dark cave
of American literature and life, by dancing Platonic shadows fueled by Twain’s
blended American genius. His characters yet speak surreally: they testify,
reify, mystify, and deify, alike.
I met the author, Ron Powers, at a State Historical Society
of Missouri luncheon in 2006, where he autographed my book, after rendering a
stirring lecture on one of Missouri’s and the nation’s greatest writers,
Hannibal’s Twain, the other being Joplin’s Langston Hughes, also a Mark Twain
admirer.
Of course, I had read—or thought I had—The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn in junior high school near St. Louis, Missouri, and its
Mississippi River, which gave special resonance to that highly symbolic novel,
about a “poor white trash” adolescent’s and “his” runaway slave, Jim’s, rafting
adventures down that river. Each man fled toward freedom and away from separate
demons. Huck was fleeing his drunken and
illiterate father, and Jim was fleeing bondage to his white female, widowed owner.
Reading a novel at 14 is a lot different than re-reading that same novel at 60!
Life experiences supply variegated glosses.
Twain wrote much more than simply Huckleberry Finn. Among
his compendious works, one finds: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Innocents
Abroad, The Gilded Age, Pudd n Head Wilson, The Prince and The Pauper, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court, Roughing It, Mark Twain’s Notebooks
and Journals, and much more. To
illustrate further, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in 1996, edited and issued her 29
volume work, The Oxford Mark Twain. Fisher is not the only compiler or editor
of Twain’s. Such a prodigious corpus
includes tales, sketches, love letters, reminisces and criticisms,
correspondence, autobiography.
Twain’s work straddles a broad and burgeoning continent and
formative period in American and global place and time. From the literary
parlors, publishing houses, and “smoke-filled” chambers of Boston, New York,
and Washington, D.C. in the east; to the
California gold mines and saloons of the West; to surging Chicago, and the Great Lakes region;
to the South with St. Louis’ and New Orleans’ muddy Mississippi River lore. Ever restless, this writer’s person, prowess
and curiosity crosses borders, oceans, languages, and cultures, enriching each,
with satiric bards, dead-pan humor and acerbic witticisms.
Mark Twain lived and wrote during an explosive period in
American history, the American Civil War era, and he does not shy away from its
central figure, Negro slavery. Instead,
he personifies it in the person of Jim, the runaway slave, to reify the human
longing for freedom, regardless of circumstance. He pairs Jim with Huck, typifying
the yeoman quest for identity, sharing a common destiny, which is the roiling
river and its risks, aboard a precarious raft, itself, a floating cameo of
America’s diverse leitmotifs.
One cannot put one’s arms around Mark Twain; he’s too large.
One cannot categorize Mark Twain; he’s too varied. One certainly cannot qualify
Mark Twain; any attempt discloses more about the qualifier than the would-be
“qualifiee!” Twain was unique: spanning American history, ethos and literature
from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War; spanning Washington Irving, whose
“Legend of Sleepy Hollow” put American letters on the map; through Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose
peers he was. He befriended General Ulysses S. Grant, publishing his memoirs
and securing an income for this ailing ex-President who was laconic as Twain
was loquacious. He also bowled in 1878 with “Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the
Unitarian minister, essayist, icon of abolitionists, and youthful confidant of
Emerson and Lowell and Holmes” who was Colonel of the 1st South
Carolina Union regiment, the first black unit officially mustered into Civil
War service in 1863.
Examining Twain’s ethos, at its roots, is revealing. Its
base is Negro story-telling, in the person of “Uncle Daniel.”This virile,
40-something year old slave enthralled black and white youngsters in Missouri
with animal tales, ghost stories, and such, to the raucous glee of his cabin
listeners. This African griot’s/raconteur’s rhythms and memes made an indelible
impression upon young Samuel Clemens’ mind. These primal impressions were
reinforced and accentuated by every distinguishable Negro personality he met thereafter
in his travels. Ron Powers, in Mark Twain, A Life, takes special note of a
former slave whom Samuel Clemens encounters in Venice, Italy, and writes about
in Innocents Abroad. Powers states, “Guiding the travelers through a trove of
Renaissance art was a man who announced himself as the offspring of a South
Carolina slave. The son of Missouri slaveholders, who sneered as a teenager, ‘I
reckon I had better black my face, for in the Eastern States niggers are
considerably better than white people,’ had for the first time encountered a
Negro who knew lofty things he did not—the meaning of “Renaissance,” for
instance. Sam was incredulous.” About this extraordinary black man, Sam wrote
in Innocents Abroad:
“He is well educated.
He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and French, with
perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly conversant with it…He
dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite.”
To his credit, author,
Ron Powers, assiduously high-lights each such encounters with memorable blacks,
thereby, adding a depth and luster to his already awesome work. Powers describes
Uncle Daniel’s voice as: “the first trumpet note of the first jazz composition
in American literature…”
Mark Twain, like all great writers, was also a great reader.
He makes his iconic character “Tom Sawyer” a reader, as unlikely as that may
seem, employing chivalry, escutcheons, heraldry, heroic themes and piratical
parody in all his appearances. That the acclaimed lecturer Mark Twain had read,
copiously, is evidenced by such allusions and by his confident, masterful use
of trope. Many editors were entranced by the flicker of Twain’s flame, not the
least among which is William Dean Howells, the “Dean of American Letters.”
Editor of the highly influential “Atlantic Monthly” magazine, Howells, himself
a novelist, befriended many other writers, including Negro poet, Paul Laurence
Dunbar. Howells was Twain’s editor,
confidante, friend, correspondent, and travel companion for decades. Arguably
he “made” Mark Twain making his voice available in the East, it having
originated in the swashbuckling West among in its newspapers. In 1868, he dined
with Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and his legendary sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose
novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is said to have started the Civil War.
Mark Twain’s private life is also treated fully. The
centrality of his wife “Livy”—Olivia Langdon—a cultured scion of well-to-do
parents, from Elmira, New York, is underscored. She was his all-in-all, and he
celebrates their love through their children, as well as in letters, verses,
architecture, travel, art, furniture, servants,
dinners, famed guests at multiple homes, loving care, and an
unmatchable—perhaps--literary legacy. She was his thermostat and his
thermometer. His wife, the mother of 5 children, three daughters who reached
adulthood, was his no-nonsense editor and his sounding board. Here a word must be said.
Mark Twain had a notoriously funny bawdy side which Livy
constantly leeched. The book is full of them.
The work is commendable, fully worthy of its subject. Read
it and rejoice.
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