Mark Twain, who was born on this day in 1835, is sometimes called America’s first literary celebrity; Adam Gopnik argues that the writer was a celebrity full stop, the first of an enduring American type.
Twain had an actor’s temperament, and he became a consummate public performer.There was a time, now long forgotten, when Mark Twain was frankly regarded as a failure.
In no area were Twain’s gifts as a show man more evident than in his memoirs. In a memorable episode in “Huck Finn,” the rapscallion Duke and Dauphin—two backwoods fraudsters posing as European aristocrats—decide, after a failed go at pseudo-Shakespeare in a small town, to hype another performance, advertised as titillating and called “The Royal Nonesuch”: it turns out to be only the Dauphin, painted in rainbow-colored stripes and crawling around onstage.
Having given up on candor, Twain invested his literary hopes for the book in its structureless structure: it would be the first book to have incidents set down out of order, not as they happened to the boy and the man but as they occur now to the remembering writer. No doubt, someone will insist that, in his taste for short, pointless fragments, he is really a brave pioneer of blogging, or that the fragmented narrative reflects the broken system of nineteenth-century capitalism or something.
Steamboat piloting, as Twain explains so well, was really an effort of memory-muscle and sang-froid. The river was a broad, if winding, line, but its depth changed, radically and unexpectedly, all the time, and the risk of beaching the boat was always huge. You had to learn the river the way you learn a book, and then count on your confidence in what you had learned to see you through.
That was his manner onstage, too. Instead of approaching the footlights and “holding” the crowd, he gave the impression of having wandered into the theatre by mistake; he’d draw a breath and pull on his cigar, and then turn, puzzled, to his listeners. “He would look up, appear startled to see his audience, and then start talking,” Powers writes. Twain’s first successful lectures, in 1866, were about a trip to Hawaii, then still called the Sandwich Islands.
Yet the moral intelligence of “Huck Finn” can hardly be overpraised. The character of Jim, in particular, the runaway slave, who is Huck’s only companion, is beautifully subtle. Jim is certainly meant to be funny—he’s a man without any education—but he’s also meant to be shrewd; he sees through the Duke and Dauphin almost before Huck does.
“En wid dat I fetch’ her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin’. Den I went into de yuther room, en ’uz gone ’bout ten minutes; en when I come back, dah was dat do’a s-stannin’ open, en dat chile stannin’ mos’ right in it, a-looking’ down and mournin’, en de tears runnin’ down.
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