One of the dozen or so books that forged my understanding of the world and literature was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which I first read when I was eight or nine. Apart from Huckleberry Finn and possibly Puddinhead Wilson, I’ve always thought Twain’s “journalism” (commentary, essays) better than his fiction, so I’m really looking forward to finally reading the unexpurgated version of his autobiography being released by the University of California Press:
… Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic — at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as “uniformed assassins” — that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer himself, feared they would damage his reputation if not withheld.
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“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.” …
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In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”
[…] __
Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.
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In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”
I do have one question about the NYTimes article, though — is Tom Sawyer actually considered high school reading material these days? Back in the early 1960s, it was assigned to my third-grade class, along with selections from Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Both of my parents were Twain fanatics (he may have been the only writer they both adored), and they gave me Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad when I complained that Tom Sawyer was a cruel, repulsive, self-important little goniff who was probably going to grow up to be a snake oil salesman.
Yutsano
My brother absolutely loves him some Samuel Clemens. This shall definitely be his Christmas present this year, as his birthday isn’t until after the holiday season.
Spaghetti Lee
I’m just a few years removed from reading it in high school, so I’ll say yes.
Martin
Tom Sawyer is usually considered grade 6+. Subject matter and dialect make it a bit too challenging usually for grade 3 unless there’s a fair bit of direction. Consider that my son’s 3rd grade class was about half first generation Chinese/Korean/Indian immigrants. Their reading skill was fine but a lack of experience and context would have made it very hard for them.
Steeplejack
Saw that article in the Times, and it got me going on some plans to dive into some Twain again soon. It has been ages since I have read anything by him.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: I can imagine this will spark a revival in interest in his works. This is definitely good news for Hal Holbrook. He came here on tour and I didn’t go see his show. I’m still kicking myself for that.
JamesC
…or president of the US, if I recall my middle school readings of Tom Sawyer correctly. When seen in hindsight, that was both cynical and observant of Clemens~
Jbird
The end of Connecticut Yankee is Wilfred Owen, only prescient. Hell, it’s even got a genuinely humorous chapter on national monetary policy and inflation. Read it again, it’s not as depressing as everyone pretends.
Also, as of 1996 we were reading it in 7th grade, but it was seared into my brain by that time by my librarian mother and I didn’t actually bother to re-read it.
Uriel
Well, to be fair- Tom Sawyer can certainly be read at the third grade level by many children.
Understanding it, on the other hand, is probably beyond the scope of many fifty year-olds in our country, as things stand.
I mean, can you really see comprehending the fence painting bit and then waltzing out to vote for Sarah Palin or supporting Limbaugh or Beck without getting a case of whiplash that would require traction for the next nine or ten months?
Uriel
Which is to say I guarantee that this:
Probably escapes the attention of 95% of the people who so desperately need to learn that lesson. As things stand, most of them probably just think he’s a really, really clever observer of free markets and the invisible hand and such, and exactly the kind of guy they want to be whenever they get around to growing up.
aliasofwestgate
I’ve only read a few of Twain’s short stories, i never did get around to actually reading his full books. Though they were options from about 6th grade on. I just kind of ignored it in favor of my love of scifi/fantasy.
At this point, i’d probably understand the context and the satire better than most. *grin* I’ve already got an overwhelming love of Terry Pratchett, Twain’s got the same twist of narration that makes them both so powerful and so sly. (and make me fall out of my chair laughing at the same time)
But an unvarnished, and completely unedited by publishers(beyond the usual grammar cleanups) autobiography by Twain himself? I will definitely jump on that later too, methinks. Clemens is definitely someone the Millenials and those of us even before them need to experience. I already know i like his voice, i just need to get a bit more of it. ^_^ With the added pleasure of watching wingnut heads go SPLODY with his impeccable wit.
mikefromtexas
I always preferred The Gilded Age. Still applies today.
aliasofwestgate
@mikefromtexas:
I’ve been saying ‘Welcome the Gilded Age 2.0’ for at least a few years among my friends. It suits the current landscape far too well.
El Cid
Some years ago, Harpers or the Atlantic or some such published an extended Twain essay on US imperialism (it was okay to use that term for a short time back in those days) and slaughter in the Philippines. Changed my view of him completely.
Since stumbling across it (i.e., in a library under his name), I’ve found my life much more profoundly affected by Orwell’s collected essays, letters, and journalism more than his fiction.
Which of course it the opposite in popular culture, because in life he wasn’t someone to pigeonhole as only writing against Commonism and Stalinism, which didn’t even fairly describe 1984 or Animal Farm.
MikeJ
It was very different when I studied it in junior high, then again in high school, and again in a 200 level class in college. Most of Twain’s work rewards study over time.
Douglas
I guess The War Prayer is not required reading in highschool?
Andrew
Mark Twain paid attention and was angry. He is not just the greatest American author, he was the greatest American ever, period.
Back in the 1960s, the language in Tom Sawyer was considerably less archaic than it is today. 50 years will do that. If you want to make some third graders happy, read Tom Sawyer aloud to them. Encourage them to request any clarification they feel they need. This will make other Twain works accessible sooner to them.
In childhood I wanted a friend like Tom, but later found him to be a remorseless tool who, sadly, will grow up to be president. Fictional characters do not get to be more alive than that.
SeanH
The thing you need to understand about Tom Sawyer is that, though his mind is not for rent, don’t put him down as arrogant.
Bill E Pilgrim
Luckily for 20th century residents, not to mention all of humanity, Twain was reincarnated as Kurt Vonnegut Jr who named his son, Mark Twain Vonnegut, after him.
I can’t wait to see who he’s reincarnated as next.
Vonnegut has done some nice pieces on Mark Twain, which I can’t find online but you can find them here apparently:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vonnegut-Twain-Lincoln-Imperialist-Weather/dp/0851246877
And yes, those who think that Mark Twain was some folksy conservative and not every bit as radical as Vonnegut are sadly victims of a whitewash.
bob h
The bloodthirsty, racist, imperialist jingo Roosevelt just came in at #2 in the Presidential greatness survey.
Bill E Pilgrim
Mark Twain on the US attack in the Phillipines, as read in public by Vonnegut, which can be found here:
Neddie jingo
Perceptive kid! It wasn’t until my third reading of Huckleberry Finn a couple of years ago that I realized what a repulsive little shit Tom Sawyer is. (In my defense, my first two readings were when I was 10 and 18. Not really ready for subtlety at those ages!)
Agree wholeheartedly with those saying that both Finn and Tom Sawyer can’t be understood fully without a thorough grounding in their historical context: Slavery (obviously), but also the Civil War (General Tom commanding the troops during play is a particularly bitter note), American imperialism, westward expansion, the flim-flammery of the Gilded Age, etc., etc.
As relevant today as on the day the ink dried.
John Moser
Twain’s patriotism was questioned by men like Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Beveridge. In other words, by Progressives, who were America’s genuine imperialists. On the other hand, two of his biggest allies in the fight against empire were Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner–who were conservatives.
Boney Baloney
It’s interesting to imagine what “Amazing Revelations” are left after all this time. You could whine about a penchant for interracial buggery, which is weak, bogus and sad; you could point out that the steamboat “cub” was in his late twenties, not his late teens, or that Twain swapped sides in the Second Revolution until he got dizzy and followed his halfwit brother Out West to avoid unpleasantness like having to take sides and stick to them.
If you’re behind the times in Mark Twain conspiracy theories, you might want to start catching up with the public domain Gutenburg archives. Oral history A: Twain’s scribblings; Oral history B: Twain’s rather embarrassing actual adventures, as extensively documented by everyone who ever knew him, plus various bankruptcy proceedings.
El Cid
@bob h: Fair enough, but FWIW, Twain’s harshest cries against imperialism were during that fantasy President of the modern right, William McKinley, about whose policies we at least had the honest to call “imperialism”, when there were direct invasions of Cuba to destroy and replace their independence struggle (i.e., a war ‘against Spain’), to take over the Philippines, and to conquer Hawaii’s governing monarchy completely. For example.
After that we never had the honesty to call our actions “imperialist” again because we ruled through subversion and through our bestest, most sincerest efforts to help the natives govern themselves — as we defined it, of course.
Boney Baloney
Twain wasn’t a shit, by the way. He was a great man, living proof that infidels could be faithful and driven by iron-hard internal motivations. His memoir publishing work with President Grant, when Grant knew he was lunch but stuck it out like a zombie to provide for his family, was an act of selflessness.
Twain came out six bits ahead, personally, while negotiating a record-setting deal for Grant… for no really obvious reason apart from wanting Grant’s survivors to be well provided for.
Ben Franklin was a shit, by way of comparison. A serious fuckhead. No room to detail his asshattery here, but he was a douchebag of the first water.
TomG
I’m very much looking forward to reading his autobiography. I’ll have to re-read much of his fiction work as well…it’s been awhile.
El Cid
Twain used King [of Belgium] Leopold’s murderous rule of the Congo (much worse than British and French imperialism, but theirs was slaughtering enough that they should have been a bit humble at pointing so disgustedly at Leopold) to portray the interaction of imperialist leadership, authoritarian power, and the manipulability — and sometimes lack thereof — of the press and cultural institutions.
King Leopold’s Soliloquoy, written in the voice of the irritated monarch defending himself.
They could have at least mentioned all the schools he was painting.
There was a huge outcry in the West against Belgian colonialism, imperialism, and slaughter, which died down once Leopold’s most mind-boggling exploitation and ethnocidal slaughter was replaced by the government of Belgium itself, which later led to an extremely close US involvement supporting Belgian colonialism in the Congo and then mostly replacing Belgian as the indirect, not exactly colonial power behind Congo/Zaire’s government.
Fair Economist
Tom Sawyer, the entire book, is far too big for a 3rd grade class. It’s about junior high level for a typical student. Snippets from Tom Sawyer, OTOH, have been a standard for beginning and elementary school readers since basically when they were published. Doesn’t everybody read the bit about whitewashing the fence?
Twain’s more daring writings are indeed religiously suppressed (pun intended) by the God and Country types. I was a big Twain fan as a child and spent a lot of time looking for The Mysterious Stranger, his last fictional work. I thought it strange it was so hard to find in my conservative religious Southern hometown even though his more popular works were ubiquitous. When I did find a copy, I realized why – it’s a profoundly irreligious book. It was obvious to me even then the locals did not want kids to know what one of the all-time favorite writers of modern children thought about their idea of god.
I didn’t find out about Twain’s liberal leanings until much later but I wasn’t surprised by that suppression either.
wonkie
I’m surprised that Twain is read in the schools at all. The literature textbook in our school disttrict has excerpts only with the n-word excised ouut.
geg6
I am almost quivering in anticipation for this. My parents encouraged reading out of your age group and my devouring of Twain and Dickens starting at around age 8 was a formative experience for me. It was those two authors who probably most influenced my eventual beliefs and values than anything else at that early stage of my life. My social liberalism, my disdain for imperialism and economic libertarianism, and my absolute disgust with the religious and their religions all stem from that period when I was just obsessed with reading their stuff. It’s when I started asking questions about politics and religion. It was the late 60s and big things were happening all around me and these writers of a century or so before were seeming very relevent to this young mind. I went straight from them, a few years later, to Hunter S. and Vonnegut. Be great to read Twain uncut and uncensored. Can’t wait.
KCinDC
The right wing will have Twain banned from the school curriculum everywhere within a year.
Alice G
Wow! You read “Life on the Mississippi” when you were eight or nine? So did I! I had devoured “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” earlier, so I was looking forward to this tome (which, as I recall, was about 860 pages long!) — but I found it boring! Thing is, I kept expecting it to get better, plodding past page 200, then page 400 — any minute now! — all the way to the end :)
Leisureguy
Tom Sawyer is a book that definitely deserves reading by adults. On a symbolic level, it’s quite a tale. And Huckleberry Finn is truly a great American novel.
Honus
@Douglas: No, and neither is Letters from the Earth.
Damned at Random
My favorite Twain is Roughing It – because I am so familiar with the Comstock country, I suppose. Along with Huckleberry Finn, I think of it as a great American road story. The tale about the frenzied trade in mining stocks is as current as the derivatives market. I’ve already asked for the uncensored autobiography for Christmas this year.
Boney Baloney
Twain kissed White Russian ass in The Innocents Abroad, and later preached dangling intestines and rusty pitchforks against the Czar, as part of a warm-up speech for Maxim Gorky before the local Chamber of Commerce. What can you say, he was a strange dude.
Bill H
I don’t remember how old I was when my mother put Tom Sawyer on my reading list. You would have to know my relaltionship with my mother and my bookworm little brother to fully understand the impact of that statement. Anyway, I didn’t finish the book and, when I got in trouble for that crime, refused to finish the book. I said that Tom Sawyer was a slimy asshole and that I didn’t want to know any more about his stupid adventures. Mother was furious, but my father laughed his ass off, took me to lunch and bought me a new football.
I later graduated higher in my class than my brother did in his, which pissed my mother off.
Boney Baloney
Mrs. Clemens blue-pencilled her husband’s output to a silly and ignorant degree, on one occasion striking the word “damn” from Huck Finn, the Great American novel. If “damn” is put back in its original place, is that uncensored?
Let’s see… “What is Man?”; that short story where people discuss farts in the presence of royalty; pretty much 400 pages of Indian culture and religion with one finger on each hand up; a vulgar and blasphemous letter to the San Francisco gas-light company expressing his unhappiness with their service; a dozen full-length letters to his older brother detailing his failings as a human being, whipping the white off his ass, all but two of them unmailed — really, what hasn’t come out? I spent a long dreary hurricane a few years ago reading quite a lot of what Twain ever wrote. Lost Quarto or GTFO.
“Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.” — Tom Sawyer, 1st draft.
Brachiator
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I like to think that the spirit of Twain landed upon Will Rogers, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks.
Doesn’t Huck Finn land on the infamous banned book list now and again? And it’s not just the right wing. School kids can opt out of Huck Finn because its use of the N-word is deemed to be racistly offensive. And not too long ago, there were a number of writers who declared Huck Finn to be bad and wholly undeserving of its place in literature, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin being the novel that everyone should read instead. I find the idea that there can only be one great American novel that touches on race to be ridiculous and find it odious that we are supposed to pit authors against one another in literary cage matches.
Tom Sawyer was one of the first novels that I read, assigned as a class assignment. Not too sure how old I was, but it had to be before the 6th grade. I thought it was fine, but wondered what more Twain had up his sleeve. The school library did not have Huck Finn, but I got it from the public library and was immediately taken with it, and found it absolutely subversive that Twain took characters from a book considered “safe” for children and put them into an entirely different universe.
I later also came to love Hal Holbrook’s stage performances, “Mark Twain Tonight,” probably still available on iTunes or on CD, but which I unfortunately did not see live, but heard on the radio. I particularly liked some lines of Holbrook as Twain, talking about the author coming in with Halley’s Comet, and expecting to go out with it.
And he did.
CalD
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As John Boehner weeps. First his America, now this.
tesslibrarian
Actually, Huck Finn isn’t on the ALA’s list of 100 banned classics; there’s no Twain there at all. Innocents Abroad standard summer reading before 9th grade here for at least one school; I didn’t expect that in Georgia, since sometimes Harry Potter books will show up on reading lists, as will other popular fiction.
What’s weird about the annual top 10 banned books list is how classics seem to pop up randomly from year to year. To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and Color Purple all show up for last year. Catcher no doubt due to Salinger’s death; Mockingbird because it is the 50th anniversary. (Not sure why Alice Walker came up again.)
Nice to know, though, that I know at least two high school teachers who spend a week on Mockingbird every year in May. One’s in Portland, OR; the other is in Canton, GA. I find that reassuring.
fucen tarmal
some irony then, that the grown up tom sawyer was mark twain himself at least in large part. actually, i think mark twain would be amused as hell that people not only actually waited 100 years to publish this memoir, but that it would be injected into an era such as this, where his words will be used across the political spectrum to condemn and glorify the right and the left. being a political football was i’m sure last on his list of priorities.
Frank
I currently have Following the Equator on my Android G1 ebook reader.
For a glimpse of the older Twain disillusioned with American imperialism and white racial exceptionalism, give it a look.
Nutella
@Boney Baloney:
I see lots of Twain/Clemens biographies on Amazon. Can you recommend a good one?
Nutella
I have pre-ordered this autobiography.
What depresses me about it is that it was voluntarily suppressed for 100 years. The neocon/imperialist shrieking about what proper patriots are permitted to say in public never changes, does it?
Citizen_X
Why does Mark Twain hate America?
Brachiator
@fucen tarmal:
Actually, I kinda got the impression that Twain himself wanted the memoir held back for a time. This is not unusual. And there is some poetic justice to the fact that two (by most) well loved Americans, Ben Franklin and Mark Twain, wrote autobiographies. They both had their eye on posterity.
@tesslibrarian:
Smithsonian Magazine recently had a nice piece on Mockingbird. And BBC radio had a wonderful feature on the novel, including interviews with a number of women who not only loved the novel, but felt that they had been influenced by Scout.
Citizen_X
There’s a description Twain wrote, that I wish I could find, of a brutal anti-Chinese riot he witnessed in California. I remember it (one of his early writings, mind you) as being one of the most incandescently furious bits of writing I’ve ever seen. Anyone know what that would be in?
jenkem
@Brachiator:
sure, but even if you guess that the author’s own private joke was the idea that the memoirs were “forbidden fruit” thus inspiring those with access to them to pour over them, to expect folks to wait 100 years, with all the self importance that implies, has to be a bit cheeky. either, no one will care, or if there is interest, descendants will say screw the dead guy, i’m publishing it now. either way, the last thing one would reasonably expect is that it would be published 100 years later.
as to ben franklin, his autobiography was that kind of tongue in cheek, self mockery, and the author’s own joke that people would take it at face value.
oops this is fucen tarmal, used jenkem to troll the drug thread
Brachiator
@jenkem:
Uh, no. I don’t quite think that cynicism and snark has always been exactly as we practice it today. There has been a long tradition of notable people either asking that all their private and unpublished writings be burned, or that they be held for 75 or 100 years.
Smithsonian Magazine has a good online article available about a little known side of Twain (Mark Twain in Love) about a juvenile passion he had for a young woman. The woman, Laura Dake and Twain later renewed a kind of friendship via letters. Many years later, a vistitor to Dake’s home noted the following:
I doubt that there are huge revelations in the new Twain material. On the other hand, I don’t think that he was just indulging in a little private joke by having the material withheld.
Franklin was one of the most talked about and written about man of his age. I don’t think that he believed that anyone would take his autobiography as the final or even most definitive word on who he was.
fucen tarmal
@Brachiator:
hmm, mark twain not cynical…interesting.
my point was more to his view of himself in tom sawyer, and the unique accuracy he brought to that age of boy, as anne laurie read it, cruel repulsive, self centered etc…which is pretty much every boy around 12 years old, fortunately for the word, we don’t stop emotionally maturing til around 15 or so.
even twain called bullshit on franklin’s autobiography. i am in the camp that believes his was a do as i say, not as i did manifesto, the old man telling the youngins how they should do it, with some extremely clever mockery…touches a nerve because my high school english teacher insisted on its sincerity, which made me send her the notes and readings from a college prof who tackled the subject from another angle…
i suppose its a better debate than where twain would have fit on today’s political spectrum.
Brachiator
@fucen tarmal:
No. I said that I didn’t think that Twain was cynical and snarky in the way that some people are today. That he would leave stuff for future generations as little more than a private joke seems more like people attempting to impose a contemporary sensibility onto Twain.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. But Clemens grew up, and Tom Sawyer may have been part of who he was, but obviously not the whole man.
I don’t much disagree with you. But I wasn’t looking at Franklin from the point of view of sincerity or insincerity. It was audacious for an American to write an autobiography at a time when Europe saw themselves as the center of the universe and couldn’t imagine an American (and a non-Aristocrat) as having much to say about himself worth reading.
I wonder what both Franklin and Twain would think about current events. I imagine that were he alive today, Franklin would have a hell of a blog, and Twain would have a kickass podcast.
Saxifrage
I agree that the threat to _Huck Finn_ from censorship is mostly passed. The real problem is the length of the work in an age in which most reading has to be done in class since students won’t read for homework, and cheatsite-summaries are only a click away. I teach at one of the best schools in my city, and only the AP-track kids get Huck Finn. In my standard-level classes our only novel-length works are Tim O’Brien’s _The Things They Carried_ and _The Great Gatsby_. Our American lit. textbook has a few pages of _Life on the Missippi_ and an anecdote from MT’s autobiography. (The only full-length work it contains is Arthur Miller’s _The Crucible_.)
I couldn’t squeeze in _Huck Finn_ even if I were allowed to, but I usually try to sneak in “The War Prayer”. And if the right-haven’t freaked over “The War Prayer”, they aren’t likely to notice a new version of the autobiography.
Tehanu
I guess not a lot of people read Connecticut Yankee any more. I remember reading it when I was about 12 and being really shocked (and saddened) by Twain’s pointing out the reality behind all the “romance of chivalry” stuff … and then being even more saddened by The Mysterious Stranger, for similar reasons. I’d already read Huck Finn, and it wasn’t till after the other two books that I began to understand what was going on there, particularly the whole business of the feud that Huck gets mixed up in. I’ve re-read it many times as an adult and get more out of it every time. Mr. Baloney can rant all he wants, but he can’t deny Twain’s ability to see through the bullshit that blinds most people.