Read Online Arguably: Selected Essays by Christopher Hitchens - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Christopher Hitchens
Tags: Non-Fiction
Ads: Link
enormous and subversive personality illumine Kaplan’s narrative, but only rarely, and then in the manner of the lightning bug that Twain himself contrasted with the lightning.
Ernest Hemingway’s much cited truism—to the effect that Huckleberry Finn hadn’t been transcended by any subsequent American writer—understated, if anything, the extent to which Twain was not just a founding author but a founding American. Until his appearance, even writers as adventurous as Hawthorne and Melville would have been gratified to receive the praise of a comparison to Walter Scott. (A boat named the Walter Scott is sunk with some ignominy in Chapter 13 of Huckleberry Finn .) Twain originated in the riverine, slaveholding heartland; compromised almost as much as Missouri itself when it came to the Civil War; headed out to California (“the Lincoln of our literature” made a name in the state that Lincoln always hoped to see and never did); and conquered the eastern seaboard in his own sweet time. But though he had an unimpeachable claim to be from native ground, there was nothing provincial or crabbed about his declaration of independence for American letters. (His evisceration of Cooper can be read as an assault on any form of pseudo-native authenticity.) More than most of his countrymen, he voyaged around the world and pitted himself against non-American authors of equivalent contemporary weight.
What about his name? Kaplan’s title and introduction imply a contradiction between the uniqueness of the man and the suggestion, in his selection of a nom de plume, of a divided self. When I was a lad, I am quite sure, I read of the young Clemens’s listening to the incantation of a leadsman plumbing the shoals from the bow of a riverboat and calling out, “By the mark—twain!” as he indicated the deeps and shallows. This story, if true, would account for both the first and the second name, and it would also be apt in seeing both as derived from life on the Mississippi. But there’s some profit (not all that much, but some) in doing as Kaplan does and speculating on other origins. In 1901 Twain told an audience at the Lotos Club, in New York, “When I was born, I was a member of a firm of twins. And one of them disappeared.” This was not the case, but by 1901 Twain had been Twain for thirty-eight years (a decade longer than he had been Samuel Clemens), and had probably acquired a repertoire of means by which to answer a stale question from the audience. Twinship and impersonation come up in his stories, it is true. Pudd’nhead Wilson relies on the old fantasy of the changeling, and notebook scenarios for late Huck and Tom stories involve rapid switches of identity, with elements of racial as well as sexual cross-dressing. But then, how new is the discovery that Twain never lost his access to the marvels and memories of childhood?
Clearly, he meant to create a mild form of mystery if he could, because elsewhere he claimed to have annexed the name from “one Captain Isaiah Sellers who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune.” But the Picayune never carried any such byline. And Twain was known all his life to be fond of hoaxes and spoofs in print, among them the “Petrified Man.” So, absent any new or decisive information, this portentous search for the roots of an identity crisis may be somewhat pointless.
* * *
One of the difficulties confronting a Twain biographer is the sheer volume of ink the man expended on his own doings. One needs a persuasive reason for preferring a secondhand account of an episode that is already available in the original. Take, for instance, Twain’s inglorious participation on the Confederate side in the Civil War. We already have his own hilarious but sour account of this interlude, in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” a sort of brief and memoiristic precursor of The Good Soldier Schweik . This melancholy, rueful, and slightly
Ernest Hemingway’s much cited truism—to the effect that Huckleberry Finn hadn’t been transcended by any subsequent American writer—understated, if anything, the extent to which Twain was not just a founding author but a founding American. Until his appearance, even writers as adventurous as Hawthorne and Melville would have been gratified to receive the praise of a comparison to Walter Scott. (A boat named the Walter Scott is sunk with some ignominy in Chapter 13 of Huckleberry Finn .) Twain originated in the riverine, slaveholding heartland; compromised almost as much as Missouri itself when it came to the Civil War; headed out to California (“the Lincoln of our literature” made a name in the state that Lincoln always hoped to see and never did); and conquered the eastern seaboard in his own sweet time. But though he had an unimpeachable claim to be from native ground, there was nothing provincial or crabbed about his declaration of independence for American letters. (His evisceration of Cooper can be read as an assault on any form of pseudo-native authenticity.) More than most of his countrymen, he voyaged around the world and pitted himself against non-American authors of equivalent contemporary weight.
What about his name? Kaplan’s title and introduction imply a contradiction between the uniqueness of the man and the suggestion, in his selection of a nom de plume, of a divided self. When I was a lad, I am quite sure, I read of the young Clemens’s listening to the incantation of a leadsman plumbing the shoals from the bow of a riverboat and calling out, “By the mark—twain!” as he indicated the deeps and shallows. This story, if true, would account for both the first and the second name, and it would also be apt in seeing both as derived from life on the Mississippi. But there’s some profit (not all that much, but some) in doing as Kaplan does and speculating on other origins. In 1901 Twain told an audience at the Lotos Club, in New York, “When I was born, I was a member of a firm of twins. And one of them disappeared.” This was not the case, but by 1901 Twain had been Twain for thirty-eight years (a decade longer than he had been Samuel Clemens), and had probably acquired a repertoire of means by which to answer a stale question from the audience. Twinship and impersonation come up in his stories, it is true. Pudd’nhead Wilson relies on the old fantasy of the changeling, and notebook scenarios for late Huck and Tom stories involve rapid switches of identity, with elements of racial as well as sexual cross-dressing. But then, how new is the discovery that Twain never lost his access to the marvels and memories of childhood?
Clearly, he meant to create a mild form of mystery if he could, because elsewhere he claimed to have annexed the name from “one Captain Isaiah Sellers who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune.” But the Picayune never carried any such byline. And Twain was known all his life to be fond of hoaxes and spoofs in print, among them the “Petrified Man.” So, absent any new or decisive information, this portentous search for the roots of an identity crisis may be somewhat pointless.
* * *
One of the difficulties confronting a Twain biographer is the sheer volume of ink the man expended on his own doings. One needs a persuasive reason for preferring a secondhand account of an episode that is already available in the original. Take, for instance, Twain’s inglorious participation on the Confederate side in the Civil War. We already have his own hilarious but sour account of this interlude, in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” a sort of brief and memoiristic precursor of The Good Soldier Schweik . This melancholy, rueful, and slightly
Similar Books
