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Twain Dreams

harpers.org

30 pointssamclemens18 comments

I agree that Mark Twain had contradictions, like all real people do, but is there anything to back this assertion from TFA?

> O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks.

"He had been a racist earlier"? I know about Twain's half-hearted stint in the Confederacy -- I've read the heavily fictionalized account he wrote about it, " The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" -- but I've never read he was fighting for any clear cause (neither slavery nor that "states rights" bullshit or anything). He probably was just caught up in it, and did no actual fighting, and got out of it soon enough (2 weeks!). Does this really qualify as "being a racist", even briefly?

Some random site I just googled, https://civilwarsaga.com/mark-twains-civil-war-experience, claims "It is not known exactly why Twain quit the militia. He defended his actions throughout the years by describing his confusion while enrolling and explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war."

So confusion = racism?

From the same page:

> "Twain also described the Civil War in general as: “A blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.” Whatever the reason, Twain left the military and never looked back."

So why does it matter? Well, it does to me, because the article flings this random assertion, that Twain "had been a racist earlier in life", and now that assertion is out there for someone else to quote it without evaluating what evidence is there, or lack thereof.

So it bugs me.

I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim. It is true that he fought for the Confederacy, and it is also true that he held racist views, by his own admission.

In an essay called Concerning the Jews, which was probably ahead of its time in defending Jewish people, he wrote:

> I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices

- https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1898twain-jews...

That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate. You can read his full thoughts in another essay called The Noble Red Man: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/redman.html. It's pretty short, but a shorter summary is that he advocates for all-out genocide and says they are the "scum of the earth" and inferior to insects.

Side note: if written today, Concerning the Jews would definitely be considered racist, because he defines Jewish people as basically a separate species with inherent traits not shared by other "races". That is the definition of racism, even if the traits you're calling out are considered positive. You can't say "I have no racial prejudices, I just think all Asians are good at math". This would maybe be an unfair standard to apply to someone writing in the 19th century, but I just want to point out that it would be reasonable to say that Twain was racist but in a much more benign way than most of his contemporaries (except when it came to Native Americans).

> I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim [...] It is true that he fought for the Confederacy.

I think it does imply it [1], and it's also an unfounded claim. Twain himself seems confused about why he joined, and deserted after two weeks without firing a single shot (his farcical account of it claims his unit killed a single man, but this has been proven false). Hardly the actions of a convinced racist.

> That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate

Yeah, I concede this. Twain framed his "Noble Red Man" as ridicule of the "noble savage" stereotype so common in literature, but even then, it's hard to find a positive example of an Indian in his writing. So I concede this point.

Though... why didn't TFA mention this instead of going on a tangent about the Confederacy?

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[1] Because TFA qualifies this as "earlier in his life", which wouldn't make sense if this was about Twain's opinions on Native Americans. It clearly links his racism "earlier in life" to his joining the army of the Confederacy.

I don't think there is much evidence for any early racism regarding African-Americans, although given his origins it would not be surprising, that said he does tend to wax nostalgic about his youth in a slave-owning town, and to deny any problem in that in his various writings focused on his own youth, so that is the kind of thing that is considered somewhat racism-adjacent in our understanding of such matters, at least.

As far as Asian racism he wrote articles against abuse of Chinese workers by police in San Francisco when he worked there as a journalist.

However where Native Americans are concerned he was quite racist https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-and-the-racist-s...

Right! I forgot about his writings on Indians. Not Twain's finest. I wonder why TFA doesn't mention this, instead of going on an irrelevant tangent about the Confederacy?

I have to say I do think Twain's writings about Indians are racist (so yeah, point taken) but always couched in ambivalence; some of it for example looks like exaggeration to ridicule the poetic "Noble Savage" of Fenimore Cooper and others, which is also bullshit (and unfortunately, lives on to modern age, "Dances With Wolves" et al).

But yeah, I admit I forgot about the Indians.

When I first read Huck Finn in high school, I thought it was just some old river story with strange spelling. I didn’t really get it. Years later, I picked it up again and realized Twain was much sharper than I gave him credit for. He was funny, sure, but there was this quiet kind of anger underneath. Now with books like James reframing his work, it feels like great writing never settles. It keeps changing and keeps asking new questions in different voices. I get the feeling Twain would have had a field day with the internet. Or at least found a clever way to make fun of all of us.

I feel like Twain was a sort of Banksy of his day... except that in regard to personal fame, he was more akin to Andy Warhol.

But his writings are incessantly, subtly, pointedly critical and yet playfully mocking of society's sins. Its real sins - not casinos and The Devil Rum - but slavery, celebrating greed, ignoring the small and the impoverished.

All the while pretending to be "just a humorist"/"just a spraypaint vandal".

"Some stories land like a meteor. Others land like a seed"

Jacob Geller, on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Yes, even our most revered heroes have restless, perpetually unfinished souls. Twain, in the public eye, is a legend of humor and satire, yet privately he was always troubled. Perhaps it’s this inner dissonance that makes his work so timeless able to touch readers even today. In a world full of “packaged biographies” and flattened images, reading such an honest and nuanced portrait of Twain feels like a rare treasure. I can almost imagine the coffee on my desk sharing in that quiet appreciation.

Lovely article, worth the read~30mins read. I’ve read the usual suspects from Twain’s body of work, but somehow I never remember any particular attention being paid to Huck’s moment of decision to go to hell trying to help Jim - I wouldn’t have thought to tie it to the classical ‘journey to hell’ katabasis trope at the time, but now - maybe it’s time for a re-read.

Those thirty minutes would have been far better spent with Twain than with a critic as thunderingly, blockheadedly obtuse as this one.

I'm having a difficult time reading this article because of the syntax, I think. So many parentheticals, a little subject verb object never hurt anyone.

Twain, like Faulkner, has long been a favored subject of the trust-fund set...now that he's safely dead and unable to render a direct opinion in the matter, of course.

In this case, the author evidently need not earn his living through the quality of his prose. He would be destitute, otherwise. But Harper's is not what once it was.

The trust-fund set? Does this mean I should get in touch with the postal inspectors and find out where all those checks have gone for all those years?

I think that you owe it to HN to let us know what authors real, red-blooded working Americans favor.

Twain, for a start.

If you mistake me for saying he shouldn't be read, in saying he lately attracts a regrettable audience which I did not say was exclusive, then you would better spend your time studying his exemplary prose than grinding in my direction whatever axe this is.

I have been reading Twain for something between 55 and 60 years, I suppose. I don't count that as "lately"; but at the time I started reading him, he had been dead for 50 years, which most would count as "safely".

About 30 years ago, Cynthia Ozick published an essay on Trollope in the NY Times Book Review. A couple of weeks later, there were annoyed letters to the editor from persons who considered that her essay had the tone of granting permission to read Trollope, as if Trollope-reading had previously been the province of Anglophile snobs.

I offer that as an example of how one may qualify an audience in terms it finds offensive without writing down the author.

Would you take it equally as a criticism of David Foster Wallace?

I don't think the syntax is particularly difficult, if slightly archaic; but the real problem is the lack of a paragraph break in the first 2 paragraphs (it felt like reading Henry James) and the way Harper's styled their website. On paper, though, even when the sentences and style are quite out there, I find Harper's to be the most readable of all the major magazines.

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