The Strange Disappearance of Mark Twain

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF MARK TWAIN Everett Emerson* In 1870, when Mark Twain's first real book, The Innocents Abroad, was published, Bret Harte reviewed it. Harte, who had known the author well while they were both living in San Francisco, identified Mark Twain as "the eccentric creation of Samuel Clemens."1 Sam Clemens invented Mark Twain as part of his literary technique. In the writings of the 1860s, Mark Twain's personality characteristics are distinct and identifiable , though not always consistent, not always the same. In fact, there are two different Mark Twains, a "before" version and an "after." One meets either a naive and youthful innocent, one who is not very bright, easily misled but well meaning, vulnerable, easily victimized and humiliated or an experienced, confident, humorous, perhaps impudent veteran, who knows the world, especially its underside, thoroughly. This after version is self-assured, irreverent, spontaneous; he is lazy, or gives that impression; he is direct, though often only seemingly so; he is more often humorous than comic, but he is usually one or the other; he is mostly good natured, though he likes to pretend sometimes that he is mightily angry. He is irrepressible, at times outrageous. He likes to make fun of gentility, pretentiousness, sentimentality, and romanticism.2 He is skeptical, and he likes to pull one's leg. He yearns for excitement, even violence. He is amused by seeing other people victimized and humiliated, but he is not sadistic or aggressive. Early in his career, in 1868, Clemens wrote to his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks, "there is nothing that makes me prouder than to be regarded by intelligent people as 'authentic' A name I have coveted so long—& secured at last! / don't care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end & aim of my ambition is to be authentic—is to be considered authentic."3 His concern was not so much to be authentic as to be considered authentic. Both the before and the after version meet that criterion: each of the two Mark Twains seems palpably present in his words. Both the vulnerability of the innocent and the casual ease of the veteran assure the reader that who touches his words touches a man. Before he met Mrs. Fairbanks, back in his Nevada and California period, Clemens also developed a second technique that contributed to *Everett Emerson is a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina and Editor of Early American Literature. His most recent book is The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (1984). 144Everett Emerson authenticity: He created another kind of voice, a story-teller, usually an older man—often a Westerner—who has had a long career as a miner, a sea-captain, or a river-boatman. This narrator speaks in the vernacular and is distinctly anti-genteel. Often he is an innocent, or rather pretends to be, and usually he tells tall tales with a straight face. After Clemens came east and became more and more "sivilized" (Huck Finn's word), he had more and more need to employ such a vernacular commentator as a subtle indicator of his own inner rebelliousness. Such a voice could not be described as that of the author and so was a safe technique for venturing ungenteel remarks. After years of living with the woman he married, Clemens began a novel about one David Gridley who by "working a deception" marries an "archangel" though he knows "there were things in his make-up which could distress this dear unworldly creature." Therefore he lets her remake him, but while "training and teaching can alter the outside of him," they cannot alter "the inside." The "elaborate sham" that Mrs. Gridley constructed was of course a hypocrite, and Gridley knew it, to his shame.4 Here Clemens told a version of his own story, perhaps to acknowledge his sense that he had betrayed part of his true self. The cast of characters includes two related versions of Mark Twain, some vernacular story-tellers, and one Samuel Clemens, under some pressure after moving east and becoming a Hartford householder to become more conventional, but still...