BOOKS
Mark Twain and the Calm Squatter By DAN J AGOBSON THE earliest known work by Samuel Clemens is a short sketch called The Dandy and the Squatter, written when Clemens was sixteen years old and working as a printer on a village news- paper. The sketch describes an encounter between a 'spruce young dandy with a killing moustache etc., bent on making an impression on the hearts of some young ladies on board ship,' and a 'tall, brawny woodsman' living in Clemens's own vil- lage, Hannibal. The dandy, who is a passenger on a steamboat passing through Hannibal, climbs off the boat and threatens the squatter, humor- ously: 'Say your prayers! . . . you'll make a capital barn door, and I'll drill the keyhole my- self.'
The squatter calmly surveyed him for a moment, and then, tlrawing back a step, he planted his huge fist directly between the eyes of his astonished antagonist, who, in a moment, was floundering in the turbid waters of the Mississippi. . . .
The sketch is clearly of no literary merit. It can, however, be considered an extraordinary foreshadowing of the theme which was to occupy Mark Twain for most of his writing life: though to say this is to run the danger of serving all the most tired and jejune of the misconceptions about his work. The central misconception would be simply to identify Twain with the squatter and With his victory over the dandy; to imagine that Twain—the Westerner, the frontiersman—was to record in his books nothing but a series of back- woods victories over one kind or another of eityfied pretension or sophistication. The truth Is, of course, a great deal more complicated; and even The Dandy and the Squatter is not without its own ambiguities and uneasiness. The sketch Opens with the claim that Hannibal is 'now [a] flourishing young city,' and the action of the story i§ set well into the past—'when such a thing as a steamboat was considered quite a sight.' But we know from Lifson the Mississippi that at the time Clemens wrote his sketch, Hannibal was hardly a 'city' of any kind, and that the arrival of a steamboat was even then still considered quite a sight' in the township. In other words, Young Clemens is already trying to claim for himself and his town a degree of sophistication Which they did not have; already he is doing his best to dissociate himself from the backswoods- man whose victory the sketch is supposed to be celebrating.
An uneasiness about the vulgarity and provin- cialism of frontier life was characteristic of Mark Twain's literary predecessors, as?.
Lynn shows in his very interestingy, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor.* The native writers whom Mr. Lynn discusses were anxious
to exploit for literary purposes the life immed- iately around them, and anxious too to explore in their work the possibilities of vernacular speech. In their determination to remain gentlemanly, however, these writers always 'framed' in con- ventional narration the passages of vernacular
* MARK TWAIN AND SOUTHWESTERN HUMOR, By Kenneth S. Lynn. (Constable, 32s. 6d.) writing which they permitted themselves. Twain was the first to abandon the gentlemanly con- vention altogether in Huckleberry Finn, and thereby set himself free to confront his characters and their society without the embarrass- ments which had haunted his predecessors, and which are so evident not only in The Dandy and the Squatter but in so many of the more considerable of Twain's other works. By adopting totally (or seeming to adopt totally) the vernacu- lar of the society he had come from, Twain was not surrendering to that society; on the contrary, .this was the condition of his freedom from either shame or boastfulness in writing about it.
Every good book is a record of the author's war with himself: the critic ought to be careful in taking sides, especially when he is dealing with someone as supple and as treacher- ous as Mark Twain, whose wars were all guerrilla campaigns fought by armed bands wearing no uniforms and sharing no principles. Twain was an extraordinarily complicated person; and it is impossible to read any account of his life—or to go through the two sumptuous volumes of the Mark Twain—Howells Letterst —without feeling that one's usual habits of summary and judgment are of little value here: the man escapes every time, even as one grasps at him. And it is evident that he escaped often enough from his own imaginative grasp, and went blundering pitiably into disaster, both in his life and his work. One can say truthfully about him that he was at once a vulgarian and the victim of the worst gentilities of his time; that he debased his own gifts for the sake of money and applause; that he was a clown, a show-off and a coward. But one says these things a little shame- facedly when one remembers that Twain was the first to say them about himself, and not in any self-pitying way, but in pain and sincerity. And one's appetite for moral certitudes diminishes even further when one remembers, 'too, that Twain's aspirations to live better and work better produced not another Huckleberry Finn, but instead (and this is a measure of the complexity of the case) an unreadable book like The Per- sonal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
In the end, after a public success comparable to that of Charles Dickens, Twain despaired— despaired of life, of art, of himself. (`The wildest extravagance' of Twain's humour, wrote Howells, 'is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some hum- bug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter.' Why was the human
race created?' Twain wrote to Howells, in a characteristic note. 'Or at least why wasn't some- thing creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity : He could have made a reputa- tion. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly.') Twain's 'pessimism' has been ascribed to
t MARK TWAIN--HOWELLS LETTERS. Volumes and 11, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson. (Harvard University Press/O.U.P., £8.) his bankruptcy after the failure of his lunatic business adventures, which was followed immediately by the death of his beloved daugh- ter, ter, Susy; it has been regarded as the punishment visited upon him by his thwarted, abused artistic conscience; ;t has also been hailed as a sign of the depth of his insight into the human condition. 'Bile! give me more bile; fry me an optimist for breakfast,' he wrote, and yet he timed his appearances in Fifth Avenue so that he would catch the crowds, and he wore a dazzling white suit to make sure the crowds wouldn't miss him. No wonder almost every American critic who has written about Twain has chosen to write of his life as some kind of an allegory of the Artist in America; and there is a curious reson- ance between Twain's empty, enraged success and the silence and anonymity of Melville.
It would be wrong. however, to leave t1 e emphasis there. A sense of waste and frustration is inevitable when one reads widely in Mark Twain's works; but the qualities which make Huckleberry Finn a great book are to be found sporadically, erratically, in many of his other works. The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mis- sissippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Anhui's Court, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Tom Sawyer, as well as the strange, late, Hawthorne-like moral fables, The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger—all these have sustained passages which show how prodigious was Twain's talent, how remarkable. was his capacity to tc11 the truth. Admittedly, one has to exercise patience in seeking these passages out. In The Innocents Abroad, for example, one sometimes feels that when Twain isn't trying to blow the gaff on Europe and all its art and culture., he is trying to show that if it pleases him he can n be just as 'sensitive' and 'poetic,' too, as the next travel-writer. So the writing alternates between jeering and purple-patches—except at those times when Twain asks himself, sincerely, 'What do I really see here What do I really feel about it?' And without fuss on pretension, with a calm, profound honesty, he answers his own question! : he sees a great deal, he feels deeply about it, and he is able to describe the external scene at d his own reaction to it fluently and finely. These moments of stillness give The Innocents Abroad its true life; in Huckleberry Finn a similar still- ness prevails almost throughout. This stillness, the unwavering purity of Huck's honesty, is the medium through which we perceive all the move- ment and violence of the action.
In Huckleberry Finn Twain—who was to think of mankind as 'ordure'—succeeded as very few other novelists have, and certainly as no other American novelist has, in drawing a totally con- vincing picture of human goodness. Both Huck and Jim are good; and their goodness is not a matter of assertion on the author's part, but arises spontaneously from what they are and what they do : it is the very sap of the book, drawn from „ its deepest levels and carrying life to every scene which the boy and the Negro participate in or witness. (Except for the last chapters, where Tom Sawyer is dominant, and the truth of the book has been lost.) The goodness of Huck and Jim sets in relief the wickedness of so much of the life on the river's banks, and the brutal falsity of the King and the Duke who take over the raft; but, as Professor Lynn points out in 1 is criticism of the book, Huck and Jim are not set in simple opposition to the people around them. Huck is forced to exercise his goodness precisely because he has so much that is false within him- self, and because his status as an outcast carries with it its own moral dangers, as the fate of his father testifies. Huck is entitled to judge the evil to which so much of the society has succumbed, partly because he so many times almost succumbs to it himself.
It is important that we should not take Huck's explicit views on `sivilisation' CI can't stand it. I been there before') as the last, nostalgic message of the book. If the sojourn on the raft were no more than an escape, no more than a threatened idyll—as it is so often considered to be—Huckle- berry Finn would be very much less interesting than it is. By any definition of the word, the relationship between Huck and Jim on the river is considerably more civilised than any relationship which they can enjoy with anyone else, or with each other, on the shore. The relationship between the two on the raft de- mands from them both those sacrifices which civilisation demands from us all, and which we frequently find most burdensome to make: it demands mutual responsibility, self-abnega- tion, and moral choice. Whatever else he may be, Huckleberry Finn is no ancestor of the Beat Generation. The tragedy of the book is that the fineness of iluck's relationship with Jim is impermanent; it cannot survive on shore, as the last chapters dismally demonstrate. Though he did not realise it, this is the saddest and fullest judgment that Twain was ever to make of 'the damned human race.'
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