The Case for Mark Twain’s Wife

THE CASE FOR MARK TWAIN'S WIFE DELANCEY FERGUSON A FEW years ago it was usual for a successful man to ascribe all his success to his mother or his wife. Usually he was lying. The chances were that he would have succeeded as well had he been an unmarried orphan. The unsuccessful man also, after the fifth drink, used to confide that he might have amounted to something if his wife hadn't held him down and cramped his style. He was usually lying, too. But only recently has biography imitated the bar-fly. Any woman in the life of a great man is nowadays in a dangerous spot. If she has openly and demonstrably misbehaved, she need expect no chiyalrous silence about her sins. If she has been the soul of chastity and circumspection, she will catch it just the same. Men of genius are proverbially gey ill to live 'with; women so indiscreet as to fall in love with them need seldom expect easy times. And nowadays they are begrudged even posthumous credit for their endurance. Ambrose Bierce's phrase about the "virtues and other vices" is applied literally. Si~ce no artist is perfect, since every achievement must fall short of the ideal, biographers have sought in the intimate environment of the artist the explanation of his imperfection. ' The jargon in which these psychoanalytical speculations are couched has disguised their essential primitiveness. They return to Adam's childish effort to blame somebody else. Aristotle was more mature: he said that a hero falls because of some tragic flaw in himself. The romantic biographers who attribute the despair of James Thomson to the death of his early sweetheart, or who explain the tortured personality of D. H. Lawrence by a motherfixation , are putting the cart before the horse. An inner weakness in the man enabled these external influences to warp him permanently . I t is time for the psychoanalytical school of biography to grow up and face reality. The most influential example of this kind of biography thus far produced jn America is Mr Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal oj Mark Twain. Mr Brooks's thesis is simple. Mark Twain, potentially a great satirist, was frightened away from his natural method of expression by the pressure of bourgeois respectability, .represented 9 THE CASE FOR MARK TWAIN'S WIFE DELANCEY FERGUSON A FEW years ago it was usual for a successful man to ascribe all his success to his mother or his wife. Usually he was lying. The chances were that he would have succeeded as well had he been an unmarried orphan. The unsuccessful man also, after the fifth drink, used to confide that he might have amounted to something if his wife hadn't held him down and cramped his style. He was usually lying, too. But only recently has biography imitated the bar-fly. Any woman in the life of a great man is nowadays in a dangerous spot. If she has openly and demonstrably misbehaved, she need expect no chiyalrous silence about her sins. If she has been the soul of chastity and circumspection, she will catch it just the same. Men of genius are proverbially gey ill to live 'with; women so indiscreet as to fall in love with them need seldom expect easy times. And nowadays they are begrudged even posthumous credit for their endurance. Ambrose Bierce's phrase about the "virtues and other vices" is applied literally. Si~ce no artist is perfect, since every achievement must fall short of the ideal, biographers have sought in the intimate environment of the artist the explanation of his imperfection. ' The jargon in which these psychoanalytical speculations are couched has disguised their essential primitiveness. They return to Adam's childish effort to blame somebody else. Aristotle was more mature: he said that a hero falls because of some tragic flaw in himself. The romantic biographers who attribute the despair of James Thomson to the death of his early sweetheart, or who explain the tortured personality of D. H. Lawrence by a motherfixation , are putting the cart before the horse. An inner weakness in the man enabled these external influences to warp him permanently...