The Author-Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction (review)

Forrest Robinson examines the dynamic that leads Samuel Clemens to disclose inadvertently more about himself in his travel writing and fiction than he is capable of revealing when he turns to autobiography, a medium in which the "author-cat"—Clemens' own term—too easily rakes dirt over painful truths. The psychological tension between the desire to reveal and the impulse to conceal and the various ways in which this informs the work is, in Robinson's view, dependent to a large extent on the central position that the "interaction between memory and painful self reproach" commands in Clemens' psyche.

Guilt—and the attendant feeling of inadequacy it engenders—provides a framework with which Clemens creates and within which he forms his relationships with others and the world around him. With this as a guiding idea Robinson offers tantalizing and complicated readings of familiar events in Clemens' life. Incidents are reexamined in terms of how they surface in the fiction and the thread of guilt and denial is traced as it manifests throughout the work from The Innocents Abroad to The Mysterious Stranger. The melodrama of Clemens' overt expression of guilt over the death of his brother Henry in a steamboat accident, for example, is revealed as part of a much darker and more tangled emotional relationship when viewed in relation to the treatment of Sid Sawyer, the fictional representation of Henry in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Clemens' ambivalence and self-doubt over his decidedly unheroic flight from service in a Confederate militia, handled in various superficial ways in the autobiographical work, can be seen more clearly as a central impetus to self-negation when examined in relation to his high regard for Ulysses Grant and Joan of Arc. In Joan, as Robinson sees it, "Sieur Louis gives voice to sentiments that Clemens experienced inwardly but could hardly address in an open and systematic way."

Notable attention is paid to the role of guilt over race and race slavery, another of the perplexing psychological elements in Clemens' biography, and Robinson's careful study of the emergence of this guilt as evidenced in Huck Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson helps serve as an approach to the enigmatic work of the author's last decade. In dealing with the later work Robinson acknowledges the debate surrounding a view that "gives too little attention to Clemens's resilient relish for life." The cumulative formative power of conscience, guilt, and grief he sees in Clemens' makeup, however, ultimately finds support in Hamlin Hill's view of Clemens as "a man engulfed by volatile, often destructive emotions." This dependence to some extent on what might be considered a familiar and insufficiently complex view of the older Clemens can make the late work seem the most intractable in terms of the thesis presented here. For example, while the point is made that The Mysterious Stranger "may be read as a series of three groping attempts to achieve imaginative closure with oppressive personal guilt" the sense that it may also be more productively read in a number of fresher, more revealing ways persists. Nonetheless, Robinson's careful, consistent approach and the depth of attention with which he probes the considerable complications of Clemens' persona creates a compelling perspective on the whole life that requires a focus on the troubled Clemens of the last decade to achieve its symmetry.

The view of Clemens presented here offers a picture of a man who seems to elude us at every turn largely because he was so practiced at eluding himself. In examining the maneuvers and counter-maneuvers of a complicated personality struggling to be seen clearly and at the same time to cover over all the traces Robinson has created a valuable inroad for a deeper understanding of Clemens and his work and a finer sense of the degree to which the two are part of one consistent and fascinating whole.