Kevin Mac Donnell (editor) - Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings

Mark Twain and Youth

Also available from Bloomsbury

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Clemens family on the porch of their Hartford home in 1884. From left to right: Clara, Sam, Jean, Livy, and Susy.

Photo by Horace L. Bundy. Courtesy Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California

To the memory of

Albert E. Stone (19242012),

whose pioneering work helped inspire this book,

and

Thomas A. Tenney (19312012),

whose unflagging energy and generous support

of Mark Twain studies inspired everyone

Mark Twain and Youth

Studies in His Life and Writings

Edited by

Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen

Foreword by Hal Holbrook

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Hal Holbrook

He was a boy raised on a river.

I used to be drowned in that river every summer and then be fished out and drained out and set going again by some chance enemy of the human race.

Youve got the whole man right there. His boyhood launching pad was the river, then the twinge of a satiric mind, the outrider with his eye on us and its going to be salty. He was raised that way. People born to be hanged are safe in water, said his mother. This is not a long stretch from Mark Twains grown-up observation, I wonder if God invented Man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

You think thats a joke? Think again. Look in the mirror. His welcome to the twentieth century is an echo: Give her soap and a towel but spare the looking glass.

The century I was born into was not funny. Mark Twain died in its tenth year, but the wave of our countrys future had been rolling in and the getting or losing of money would define it. Nor was my boyhood funny. I was raised by my grandfather down near the ancestral landing on the way to Cape Cod, along with my two sisters, because our Mom and Dad had left us in the playpen and hit the road. Never came back. Nobody wanted us so Grandpa took on the job. He was our hero. Strict. Hair combed at breakfast and speak when spoken to. Survive on your own, that was the New England game and I wandered by myself through the blueberry patch out back and made my own Kentucky long rifle out of the branch of a tree when I was Danl Boone, and all that stuff Tom Sawyer did was part of me, except I did it alone and I never heard of Sawyer.

Books? There were no books. Only one shelf in the small bookcase to the right of the fireplace, about the genealogy of New England. Never read that, but my Grandfather gave me two books in the Rover Boy series. The Will to Win and Do or Dare . They prepared me for suicide. Never heard of Twain. That was much later, twenty-nine years old was my age then and Id been out on the road for four years with my first wife, Ruby, trying to make a living with a little two-person show we put together in college to tour schools, and Mark Twain was in one of the sketches we did. Suddenly we had a baby and the show was history. Do you know what its like walking the hot cement sidewalks of New York looking for a job as an actor when nobodys heard of you and nobody cares two cents how desperate you are? Join the club is the answer to that.

I turned around one day and went up to the office of a tough old bird who knew Twain because his father booked Mark Twains lecture tours. Why dont you do a solo?

What??

Twain.

Go out on the stage alone?

I think you could get bookings, said Bim Pond. He didnt smile.

I walked out on 45th Street and looked at the people and the taxis going by and felt as hopeless as I would ever feel again. I walked up to 59th Street to the old Argosy Book Store. Wheres Mark Twain?

Upstairs to the left. At the end.

This guy wrote a lot of books. Tom Sawyer . Heard of him and took it home. By page three I started feeling better. I dont know why. Maybe it took me back to the blueberry patch and the long rifle. At Argosy, I got some more. Roughing It , Huckleberry Finn , and a book called Mark Twain Social Critic . Social critic? I thought he wrote books for kids!

That was sixty-two years ago. Yes, he was a social critic and yes he used children to write his books, but maybe thats where the subversive part comes in. That wry country kid in the guise of Huck Finn describing his Pap thus: Whenever his liquor begun to work, he most always went for the government.

Call this a guvment! Just look at it and see what its like! Why, looky here. There was a free nigger over there from Ohioa mulatter.... And what do you think? Why, they said he was a pfessor in a college, and could talk all kind a languages, and knowed everything.... And that aint the wust! They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out! Thinks I, whats this country acoming to? Why, it was lection day and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warnt too drunk to get there; but when they told me they was a state in this country where theyd let that nigger vote, I drawed out.... The country may rot for all of me.

The world he observed turned him into a subversive because some of it was not nice. The salty grin concealed it. Maybe he used children as a disguise. The boy on the raft going down river with a runaway slave, from him he learns about loyalty and friendshipOn the raft, not from his father. In Tom Sawyer the great Judge Thatcher visits the Sunday school and praises the dear children for reading their Bible so diligently and asks Tom the names of the first two disciples. His teacher freezes. It is impossible this boy can come up with the answer. David and Goliath , says Tom.

Twain was taking an uppercut at the hypocrisy of the frontier Calvinism hed been enslaved under in Hannibal. American literature of the later 1800s began to release the pent up passion to escape religious hypocrisys stranglehold on Americas conscience. Lawrence Berkove writes about it eloquently in this book and the boy from Hannibal began to preach. But his sermons were disguised. Children did the preaching. Huck Finn, the Prince and the Pauper, Joan of Arc, and Sandy in A Connecticut Yankee . Lots of people didnt get it. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was pulled out of the libraries over a hundred years ago because it wasnt proper reading for young minds. What a joke! It wasnt proper reading for the racist nation called America that was busy lynching Negroes.

Maybe Mark Twain used the young generation to express his commentary on the hypocrisies of his world until they overwhelmed him. Was Joan of Arc a hymn to the daughter he loved and lost, Susy? The world began to break apart then. The larger world and the personal one surrounding him. Hed seen the Devil at play in Americas corporate front yard and in our nations grab in the Philippines and he knew it by the back and gave up hiding behind children. I am against the eagle putting its talons on any other land.

But it was in this disguised but darker world of Twain that Hollywood has failed our great American chronicler. Mark Dawidziak pursues that humbling fact through his account of the films about Twain and his books where Hollywood has dropped the ball. Why? No guts. They are afraid of anything that rises above the level of box office perfume and that has killed more good stuff in our literature-to-film agenda than anything else. When I met Fredric March after playing Twain in Hollywood in 1959, he said, Tell me, didnt you feel this guy was a horses ass? That white suit and all? I said I didnt look at it that way. Well, you understand him. March was a hero actor for me in film and on stage, and he did a good job in The Adventures of Mark Twain , but that was because March was one hell of an actor. The dialogue smelled Hollywood, but he surmounted it. Mostly. Whenever the film business has got hold of Mark Twain, they detour around the gut and soul of him. His satiric, subversive view of us all does not suit a money machine. The greatest crime the motion picture business has committed in my particular view is to have allowed Huckleberry Finn to be turned into Hollywood mendacity instead of what it should be: the great American film. They lack the courage. Look at John Fords The Grapes of Wrath and think what Huck could have been.