Where the Twains Meet: Iconic Figure, Family Man
Mark Twain lived an enormous, fractious life and was determined
to defy categorization. In 1879 he commented to an audience, "I
don't mind what [the critics] say of me so long as they don't tell
the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about
me, I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage." Over
the past 70 years, biographers have published their various "truths"
about Twain: the damaged son of a castrating mother, a split personality,
a womanizer, an impotent man, a child molester, a hypochondriac,
a gold digger, an abusive spouse, a neglectful father, a racist,
a misogynist, and an alcoholic. With such a richly dysfunctional
pedigree, if only Twain had sung in a rock group, he'd be a ripe
subject for one of VH1's Behind the Music exposés.
Ken Burns's film Mark Twain will be broadcast on PBS January 14
and 15, and my interpretation of Twain is included in the production
— that he intentionally surrounded himself with women, and
that his capacity to produce extended fictions had almost as much
to do with the environment shaped by his female family as with the
talent and genius of the writer himself.
This is a documentary designed for a general audience, and its
high profile promises to make the film, as well as the version of
Mark Twain presented in it, a standard reference point for years
to come. A canonization is likely to occur, which conference panels,
journal articles, and Internet discussion groups will dedicate themselves
to deconstructing. For Twain scholars who have lifelong investments
in the figure they have researched and created, any deviation from
what they consider to be their "truth" will be vehemently
denounced. For biographers, at issue will be the question: Which
Mark Twain has Ken Burns chosen to portray?
Four years ago, I learned that Burns was planning to make a documentary
about Twain the way I usually gather information in Twain studies:
namely, through conference gossip. I was sitting with my good friend
Michael Kiskis, a professor of American literature at Elmira College,
in Elmira's auditorium at the Third International Conference on
the State of Mark Twain Studies when we heard from a fellow audience
member that people would soon be contacted by the Burns crew, and
we wondered out loud who they might be.
Certain individuals in Twain studies appear regularly in the media,
and I assumed they would be the ones selected. Yet, to my surprise,
I was called in addition to some, but not all, of the regulars.
Dayton Duncan, the film's co-producer, and writer of the script
with Geoffrey C. Ward, phoned and told me that Ward had read my
biography, Mark Twain in the Company of Women, and had urged Duncan
to contact me. We spoke for quite a while that day and made arrangements
to meet near Burns's headquarters, in Walpole, N.H., to continue
our conversation. On a sunny July day one year after the Elmira
conference, we met in the town's heavenly scented chocolate shop,
and by the end of our conversation, I had agreed to be a project
consultant.
Scholars as well as the public feel an extraordinary sense of ownership
concerning Twain, and I commented on the dangerous eddies of these
emotional waters to Duncan in our various conversations. These currents
must be negotiated by anyone working in the area; my introduction
to them came in 1986, when, as a graduate student, I discovered
the largest cache of Twain correspondence to date, now known as
the "Hollywood Letters." The majority of the 100 letters
were written by Twain to his three daughters, and he wrote to them
as his intellectual equals, sharing anecdotes as well as financial
worries. My image of Twain had been the iconic "American Adam,"
a wisecracking, solitary wanderer, but the letters revealed a previously
hidden side of Twain.
I was surprised to learn that he was such a family man. This aspect
of Twain's life captured my imagination, and 15 years later, I'm
still intrigued. After I spent years reading through crumbling letters
and water-stained journals in archives from Berkeley, Calif., to
Hartford, Conn., it became evident that in both personal and literary
realms, Twain was a man hugely influenced by women. Women affected
Twain's racial and political views; defined his boundaries, both
personal and literary; edited his books; provided models for his
fictional characters; and shaped his prose.
My thesis was controversial at the time, and I came to appreciate
what the Twain scholar Hamlin Hill, now an emeritus professor of
English at Texas A&M University, warned about in his incendiary
essay "Who Killed Mark Twain?" -- that people interested
in challenging long-established constructions of Twain, "a
hero, a prophet, a legend, a demigod," present an awfully tempting
target. In my conversations and filmed interview with Duncan, I
spoke about the Twain so dependent upon his female circle that when
those individuals who were his creative collaborators died, his
fiction did too.
It is a moonless August evening last summer, and I find myself
sitting once again in the same Elmira auditorium watching an audience
gather for a preview of the Twain documentary. For the past two
days, the Fourth International Conference has been in full swing,
with panels and exhibitions occurring all over the campus. The crowd
pours through the doors. Filmmakers, scholars, fans, reporters,
collectors, dealers, and impersonators are all there for the same
reason: to hear Ken Burns speak and to see excerpts from this accomplished
documentarian's latest film. There's a chance I'll be included in
this cut of the project, and not knowing whether I'll be making
my screen debut this evening makes me both nervous and curious.
While I never admitted this to the Burns people, I've seen only
brief pieces of his work over the years, so I'm not sure what to
expect. As I settle into my seat, Burns and Duncan graciously greet
various functionaries while a half-dozen Twain impersonators scattered
throughout the audience salute one another, genuflecting and ceremoniously
bowing.
I tend to avoid the impersonators; they're a bit unsettling and,
taken together, chronologically disjunct. The Twains keep popping
up in unexpected places, like the coffee line, at registration,
and in the parking lot. There's a young bushy-haired Twain, a few
graying, middle-aged specimens, and an elderly fellow who has let
himself go and really doesn't resemble Twain anymore, but no one
has the heart to tell him. By the second day, the performance aspects
of academic presentations and impersonations begin to merge, and
I scrutinize conference-goers, trying to determine if they might
be impersonators, too. Perhaps we all are.
Over the years while researching various projects, I've discovered
that Twain gets under admirers' skin in ways that I believe other
authors don't. With striking frequency, simple transactions become
covert operations. Only at a Twain conference would a dealer approach
me, as one did at Elmira, and, after checking to make sure curious
eyes couldn't see what he was doing, remove from his blazer pocket
postmortem photographs of Olivia Clemens, Twain's wife. Rumors about
the photos' existence had circulated for years. He was showing them
only to certain people, he said. Putting my squeamishness aside,
I recognized he was doing me an enormous favor and profusely thanked
him.
Burns and Duncan introduce the film by talking about their respect
for Twain and the challenges they faced during the project. The
lights dim, and on a very large screen, we see the flickering image
of an elderly Twain walking the grounds of his last home, Stormfield,
in Redding, Conn.
As the narrative unfolds, I'm listening to the Mark Twain catechism.
Born into a poor family in Florida, Mo., on November 30, 1835, through
his native genius and fearsome drive, Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
by the end of his life, had transformed himself into Mark Twain,
the most famous man in America. A cigar-box label succinctly conveys
the good will that Twain enjoyed during his final decade: "Mark
Twain: Known to Everyone -- Liked by All." The material is
beautifully presented and familiar, all is well, and I particularly
enjoy the Innocents Abroad section, because it's great to hear Twain's
words read aloud. There are some photographs of him I've never seen
before. The film skips in sequence to the section on Elmira, where
he summered for 20 years with his family, and I hear my voice before
my face appears. I'm just confounded, for lack of a better word,
and my seatmate thoughtfully elbows me just in case my attention
has wandered. When the film concludes, the audience gives it a cheering,
standing ovation.
Afterward, we traipse outside, where sweet New York champagne awaits
and friends come over to tease and congratulate me. I overhear people
criticizing the film and realize that this is just the start. I
walk over, greet Burns, and tell him that the experience of seeing
myself was startling. He cheerfully responds, "Wait until 40
million people see you." Somehow I never thought about numbers
of viewers until this moment. Forty million is an unreal figure.
Since August, I have seen the entire documentary, and it is visually
stunning, informative, moving, and -- dare I say it? -- scholarly.
The documentary's running time is four hours, two hours per episode.
The first episode follows Twain through his boyhood, his first book-length
success, Innocents Abroad, and his composition of The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn. The second episode explores the private Clemens,
surviving bankruptcy and family tragedies, and the worldwide fame,
riches, and legacy of Mark Twain.
The perfect moment comes at the beginning of the second episode,
when the author Russell Banks speaks so eloquently about Twain and
race. When working with Twain, the topic of race is a constant,
and at some point, I think, it is easy to wonder whether any more
can be added that hasn't already been stated and restated. Banks,
though, talks simply and purely, with enormous impact, about how
Twain's literature challenges and alters racial constructions. Banks
contends that Twain's literature affects the margins, not the center,
and that, in time, the margins expand, changing the center. His
remarks are accompanied by photographs of schoolchildren. I was
deeply moved. My guess is that, for most viewers, the segment about
the awful, untimely death of Twain's daughter Susy from meningitis
will be the emotional apex of the film. The filmmakers take their
time wringing out all the pathos possible, and there's plenty to
be wrung.
When I was at Elmira, a Twain insider told me that she had seen
the entire documentary and was disappointed because the last half
was so sad. Yet Burns offers a version consistent with the biographical
facts; he portrays the multiple tragedies in Twain's life and how,
in the end, Twain traded his family for fame and wealth.
My response to her: If the filmmakers had desired, they could have
made the documentary much darker by including segments about how
Twain drove Charles Webster to an early death by wrongfully charging
him with mismanagement of Twain's publishing company and forcing
him out. Less than a year later, a humiliated and broken Webster
died, just 39 years old. They could have gone into how Twain viciously
destroyed the reputation of Isabel Lyon, his personal secretary,
out of spite and loyalty to his daughters Jean and Clara. Or how
he was so estranged from Clara, when she was his only surviving
daughter, that she let him go to his grave without telling him that
she was pregnant with his only grandchild.
But Burns didn't, and left those of us who love spending time in
quiet archives, researching and thinking, something to write about.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B16
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, issue dated January
11, 2002
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