The Author-Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction

4. Telling Fictions

 Telling Fictions I have argued that Clemens’s explicitly autobiographical writing arose out of a need to confess the truth about himself, and failed because of a countervailing need to conceal the same thing. He recognized his failure for what it was, but knew at the same time that the dark truth would out, the exertions of the vigilant author-cat notwithstanding. It followed—though Clemens was slow to draw this inference—that guilty self-revelations would surface most readily in his travel books and novels, where license to fictionalize doubled as a sedative to the censors. The guilty truth was thus most likely to appear when its exposure was apparently least at issue; the need to confess came closest to satisfaction when the need to conceal seemed least urgent. This is not to deny that Clemens was prey—constantly, painfully, and often consciously—to the inward sting of conscience. Virtually any thought or human interaction could be turned to offense, and the perverse play of mental associations led almost invariably to one or another of his ‘‘permanencies ,’’ to the repertoire of real and imagined ‘‘sins’’ that recycled on a regular basis through his consciousness. Indeed, the resurgence and characteristically evasive management of painful memories—of the measles, of Henry, the war, dueling, the Whittier dinner, the burning tramp and other childhood calamities, and slavery—recapitulates the pervasive pattern of telling and untelling so characteristic of Clemens’s work. This pattern is nowhere more in evidence, we have found, than in the travel writing, and most especially in the books—Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, and Following the Equator—that feature memories of the early days in Missouri and the Far West. We will find the same pattern in the novels, and most especially in those that take rise from the same reservoir of memories—of childhood, the river, slavery—often referred to as the matter of Hannibal. Here, in the putative garden, the idyllic America as yet unspoiled by the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the age of the Robber Barons, Clemens’s memory and imagination shaped fictions as obliquely revealing of his inner anguish as anything he ever committed to print.   The Author-Cat Clemens’s first novel, The Gilded Age (), which he coauthored with his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, is a notable exception to this general pattern. Clearly, collaboration was not conducive to autobiographical selfdisclosure . Though members of his family served as models for major characters —most famously, Colonel Sellers is based on his mother’s cousin, James Lampton—Clemens was not closely identified with anyone in the book. Nor did the novel’s thematic emphasis—on private greed and political corruption in the post–Civil War era of its title—arouse moral misgivings that cut close to home. Justin Kaplan has rightly observed that the rapacious speculative code Clemens ‘‘detested was also, in part, the one he lived by. He wanted to get rich, not just get along’’ (MCMT, ). Yet if we are inclined to view such bald acquisitiveness as a grave defect of character, Clemens was not. His father’s insolvency and the grinding poverty of his childhood years produced in him a craving for wealth and security so consuming that it overrode most moral restraints. ‘‘Oh, it is a fearful thing to be poor!’’ exclaims a leading character in The Gilded Age (GA, ). Avarice for Clemens was a sin in others, but he was himself somehow exempt. As Gregg Camfield has shrewdly observed, it did not bother the novelist that his book attacking greed was itself undertaken primarily in the hope that it would make him rich.1 Because the focus of The Gilded Age is directed outward toward the folly of the larger public world of business and politics, Clemens’s very considerable moral energy in the novel is seldom turned inward upon himself. To be sure, there is a shudder of self-reckoning early in the narrative, when the engines on the steamboat Amaranth explode, leaving many either dead or seriously wounded. ‘‘But these things must not be dwelt upon,’’ Clemens observes, doubtless with poor Henry’s death foremost in mind. He goes on in spite of himself to add, with rueful irony, that an inquest into the accident concluded: ‘‘NOBODY TO BLAME’’ (GA, ). The novel is also an oblique index to his ongoing concerns about race and slavery. At the numerous points in the narrative where attention is drawn to the plight of former slaves in the...