“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”—Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940)
Turn almost anywhere this past week—newspapers, magazines, the Internet—and you were bound to find something on Mark Twain, who died 100 years ago on this date in Redding, Conn. (This time, the reports of his death weren’t “greatly exaggerated.”) It’s difficult to imagine another American writer garnering so much attention.
But Twain’s never really left the public conversation, has he? Somewhere, somebody is quoting him—or mistakenly attributing a quote to him, the general theory being that if you can’t locate the maxim’s source, there’s a good chance Twain said it, because he said or write so much anyway, didn’t he?
One of the more provocative pieces commemorating the event was a review of five books, printed in this past weekend’s Financial Times. In it, John Sutherland squarely poses questions on Twain as artist: “Dickens published 12 novels, any one of which can be argued to vindicate his status as Britain’s greatest. But where are Twain’s dozen? What makes him the ‘father’ of American fiction?”
Few critics would include Twain among such self-conscious craftsmen as Gustave Flaubert or Henry James. On the other hand, how many classics have been perfect? Don Quixote? Anna Karenina? I don't think so. Yet who would deny the richness of these books? Huckleberry Finn is not even half as long as these, but is every bit as memorable as those two.
The easiest way to tackle Sutherland’s questions is to look at genre. Twain’s roots were not in the complex urban environments that fed the novelistic genius of Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, but rather from the American West (even the state in which he was born and grew up, Missouri, though ostensibly part of the slaveholding South, was at the western rim of that region). The short “tall tale” was the genre of choice there.
Sutherland’s overview of five books does not address what might be Twain’s most crucial contribution to American literature: his use of language. Other writers (e.g., Artemus Ward) had experimented with dialect, but their attempts were so heavy-handed that they can only be read with difficulty now. Twain used dialect far more delicately, and for a wider range of effects, either for something approaching poetry (Huck’s description of the Mississippi), subtle irony, or uproarious exaggeration.
Twain continues to be read because so much of his subject matter continues to be central to the American experience: racism, violence in the home and in the body politic, the battle of reason and faith, and corruption.
The fast, sometimes slapdash manner in which Twain crafted his work might be best understood by comparing him with one of the great satirists of American cinema, screenwriter-director Preston Sturges, who, at his height in the early-to-mid-1940s, produced seven wildly funny, masterful--if imperfect--films in four years. Read these paragraphs from “The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges,” by Douglas McGrath, in the May issue of Vanity Fair, and tell me if they don’t apply equally well to Twain as to Sturges:
“The Sturges pictures were a jab in the ribs, a sexy joke whispered in church—a wink, a kiss, and a hiccup. His pictures of life in this country are a lot like life in this country: messy, noisy, sometimes tough to take, sometimes hard to beat.”
And, perhaps even more apropos:
“While he does examine issues that are important to what it means to be an American—giving comic (and other) consideration to questions of ambition, money, heroism, and morality—he examines them with a flashing wit and a poet’s gift for slang that offers American English at its most entertaining.”
Turn almost anywhere this past week—newspapers, magazines, the Internet—and you were bound to find something on Mark Twain, who died 100 years ago on this date in Redding, Conn. (This time, the reports of his death weren’t “greatly exaggerated.”) It’s difficult to imagine another American writer garnering so much attention.
But Twain’s never really left the public conversation, has he? Somewhere, somebody is quoting him—or mistakenly attributing a quote to him, the general theory being that if you can’t locate the maxim’s source, there’s a good chance Twain said it, because he said or write so much anyway, didn’t he?
One of the more provocative pieces commemorating the event was a review of five books, printed in this past weekend’s Financial Times. In it, John Sutherland squarely poses questions on Twain as artist: “Dickens published 12 novels, any one of which can be argued to vindicate his status as Britain’s greatest. But where are Twain’s dozen? What makes him the ‘father’ of American fiction?”
Few critics would include Twain among such self-conscious craftsmen as Gustave Flaubert or Henry James. On the other hand, how many classics have been perfect? Don Quixote? Anna Karenina? I don't think so. Yet who would deny the richness of these books? Huckleberry Finn is not even half as long as these, but is every bit as memorable as those two.
The easiest way to tackle Sutherland’s questions is to look at genre. Twain’s roots were not in the complex urban environments that fed the novelistic genius of Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, but rather from the American West (even the state in which he was born and grew up, Missouri, though ostensibly part of the slaveholding South, was at the western rim of that region). The short “tall tale” was the genre of choice there.
Sutherland’s overview of five books does not address what might be Twain’s most crucial contribution to American literature: his use of language. Other writers (e.g., Artemus Ward) had experimented with dialect, but their attempts were so heavy-handed that they can only be read with difficulty now. Twain used dialect far more delicately, and for a wider range of effects, either for something approaching poetry (Huck’s description of the Mississippi), subtle irony, or uproarious exaggeration.
Twain continues to be read because so much of his subject matter continues to be central to the American experience: racism, violence in the home and in the body politic, the battle of reason and faith, and corruption.
The fast, sometimes slapdash manner in which Twain crafted his work might be best understood by comparing him with one of the great satirists of American cinema, screenwriter-director Preston Sturges, who, at his height in the early-to-mid-1940s, produced seven wildly funny, masterful--if imperfect--films in four years. Read these paragraphs from “The Seven Wonders of Preston Sturges,” by Douglas McGrath, in the May issue of Vanity Fair, and tell me if they don’t apply equally well to Twain as to Sturges:
“The Sturges pictures were a jab in the ribs, a sexy joke whispered in church—a wink, a kiss, and a hiccup. His pictures of life in this country are a lot like life in this country: messy, noisy, sometimes tough to take, sometimes hard to beat.”
And, perhaps even more apropos:
“While he does examine issues that are important to what it means to be an American—giving comic (and other) consideration to questions of ambition, money, heroism, and morality—he examines them with a flashing wit and a poet’s gift for slang that offers American English at its most entertaining.”
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