New York Review of Books Review

FRESH AND FUNNY today as he was more than a century ago, Mark Twain wittily distrusted everything bogus, inflated, predictable or empty. He was a man of a thousand American parts - novelist, stand-up comic, travel writer, impresario, capitalist, full-time celebrity and coruscating social critic - whose ear for dialogue, nuance, slang and absurdity seldom failed him. No wonder we still read him, debate him, scold him, censor him. William Dean Howells aptly canonized him as the "Lincoln of our literature." Although his life and works have been ceaselessly raked over by such fine critics as Ralph Ellison, Justin Kaplan, and more recently by Ron Powers, Twain remains a mysterious stranger. How did the uneducated boy from Hannibal, Mo., become the energetic superstar who seemed to encapsulate the very essence of America, even as he skewered it? He was a liberal, a racist, an anti-imperialist, a kind man, an angry man, a nonracist and a riot. Two new books squarely place Twain, né Samuel Clemens, in the booming, tearing America that he loved and loathed. The amply illustrated "Mark Twain's America: A Celebration in Words and Images," by Harry L. Katz and the Library of Congress, with a poignant foreword by Lewis Lapham, opens with a salute to Twain's early years and to the Mississippi River, whose surface and depth Twain once likened to a book with "a new story to tell every day." Chronicling Twain's peripatetic life in a series of lithographs, wood engravings, newspaper clippings and stunning photographs, many of young Clemens, the volume is chock-full of pictures of such contemporaries as Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and J.P. Morgan. Also plentiful are the illustrations from Twain's various publications as well as front-page editorial cartoons - there's a particularly horrid cartoon of Susan B. Anthony - along with pictures by Eadweard Muybridge and Lewis Hine, as well as a little-known Thomas Nast painting of the New Orleans riots of 1866. Since its publication, "Mark Twain's America" has come under criticism for what some Twain specialists say are a number of errors and missing or inaccurate attributions, and the Library of Congress recently issued a statement pledging "to correct resulting problems" in any forthcoming editions. But the book is more notable for its many visual documents than the facts of Twain's life, which are readily available elsewhere. A self-educated printer-journalist, in his early years Twain had paddled his beloved Mississippi as a steamboat pilot (we see a picture of his pilot's certificate) until the Civil War, when for two weeks he served as a Confederate irregular (he quit). He then lit out for the Nevada Territory, illustrated in a fine photograph by Timothy O'Sullivan. (We also see the seal of the Nevada Territory, attributed to Twain's brother, and several drawings from "Roughing It," Twain's book about his experiences on the frontier, in which he sounds like Huck Finn.) Leaving Nevada for California, he worked as a miner, a prospector and a newspaper reporter. By then he had changed his byline to Mark Twain (a river phrase meaning two fathoms, or 12 feet deep) and in 1869 published the successful "Innocents Abroad," an irreverent sendup of the American tourists he had accompanied on a landmark excursion to Palestine. During the voyage, he saw a small, lovely picture of Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y. Twain fell headlong in love with the intelligent, frail daughter of a family devoted to radical causes like abolition and women's education. Their happy marriage lasted until her death. But though Twain had journeyed far from the Missouri of his childhood, he never really extricated himself from it. In no book is this more apparent than in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," where Twain mingles nostalgia for the putative innocence of an antebellum boyhood with memories of violence, cruelty and reflexive racism. Sure, he creates a Huck whose instinctive compassion and intelligence seem to trump bigotry and proscriptive pieties. Sure, Huck's view of the fugitive Jim seems to broaden and widen as the novel progresses, especially when Huck finally decides he'll risk everything to save Jim from slavery. Yet there's that unsettling conclusion, when Huck reneges on his promise to go along with Tom Sawyer's callous game, aptly called an "evasion," to free a slave who, we subsequently learn, is already free. "In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more abrupt or more chilling descent," the critic Bernard DeVoto famously said. IN "HUCK FINN'S AMERICA: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece," Andrew Levy, a professor of English at Butler University, argues that Twain's controversial novel not only bears unpleasant tidings about America's fraught race relations but significantly contributes to and draws from the 19th-century debates about child-rearing, juvenile delinquency and educational reform. According to Levy, "Huck Finn" fuses popular bad-boy literature (like Thomas Bailey Aldrich's now forgotten "The Story of a Bad Boy") with the minstrel show that Twain loved in his youth. In fact, Levy suggestively claims Twain devised a way to speak in blackface - that is, to articulate "the slave's authentic political consciousness" through the character of Jim "because he was afraid of what a white audience would do to him if he told them what he thought out loud." Besides, he could get more laughs. Twain actually did speak as Jim during the four-month "Twins of Genius" tour he'd arranged before the publication of "Huck Finn" in 1885. Having persuaded the Louisiana writer George Washington Cable to appear onstage with him, Twain read in dialect from what he called the "Negro passages" in his book while Cable sang and recited scenes from his novel "Dr. Sevier." But just before the tour, Cable delivered an incendiary speech calling for integrated public spaces and civil rights for blacks. He then published it as "The Freedman's Case in Equity" in the very same magazine that was running excerpts from "Huck Finn." Cable stole the spotlight or, as Levy puts it, "had taken control of the narrative." Drawing on the voluminous Twain criticism, "Huck Finn's America" unfortunately suffers from a surfeit of academic prose (Levy's repeated use of "narrative" and "cultural strategies" would doubtless set Twain's teeth on edge). It also suffers from a surfeit of theories - some incontrovertible, some astute, some belabored. While Levy claims Twain's complex view of children "paralleled his work on race relations," the nature of the connection is not quite clear beyond Twain's wellknown gift for exploiting or puncturing stereotypes. More persuasively, Levy contends that by importing the minstrel show "into the mainstream," Twain presumably "helped invent the mechanism through which uncountable 20th-century cultural workers ranging from fashion designers to novelists could pilfer materials from people of color without leaving fingerprints." But when Levy says our failure to understand Twain's use of minstrelsy reflects our refusal to see how the present repeats the past, his key point reads more like a jeremiad against the myth of progress than an analysis of Twain's darkly comic, even fatalistic, genius. Levy obviously loves "Huck Finn" but at the same time seems uncomfortable because he's drawn to a book rife with racial slurs and unlikable caricatures. As a consequence, his discussion of Twain's equivocal progressivism is a noble-hearted attempt to rescue as well as reproach a book saturated with ambivalence, which Levy rightly acknowledges as the legacy of Twain - and America. BRENDA WINEAPPLE is the author, most recently, of "Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877." She is writing a book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.